The Films of Theo Angelopoulos: A Voyage in Time

Evangelos Makrygiannakis

Thesis submitted for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

The University of Edinburgh

2008
 Abstract

This thesis provides a critical enquiry into the films of Theo Angelopoulos. Dividing
his films into two periods—the one running through the seventies and the other
starting with the advent of the eighties—I will examine the representation of history
in the first period of Angelopoulos and the metaphor of the journey in his subsequent
films. Furthermore, I will trace the development of an aesthetic based on long takes
which evokes a particular sense of time in his films. This aesthetic, which is based on
the internal rhythm of the shot, inscribes a temporality where past, present, and
future coexist in a contemporaneous image. Being free from the requirements of an
evolving plot, this image is an autonomous image which allows the passing of time
to be felt. Autonomy, which I will define after philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis as
an immanent movement towards change, can be also used to describe the process of
changing oneself or a given society from within. In exploring the resonances
autonomy has, I will make a connection between the social and the cinematic; an
attempt which is informed by what Angelopoulos’ films do of their own accord. In
this way, I will suggest that Angelopoulos is important not only for the history of
film but also for one’s modus vivendi.

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 Acknowledgements

I would like to deeply thank my supervisors, the late Professor Dietrich

Scheunemann, Professor Martine Beugnet and Professor John Orr, for all their
precious feedback and support throughout the years.

I would also like to thank those that have been my friends and companions during
my time here in Edinburgh and who have shaped my every day life: Stella for being
there through this last period and before, Tony for the delightful surplus of words
and for the nights of screenings at your flat, Stefane the world is our rock lobster:
thank you for the little bits of madness that bring the sun back on a cloudy day and
for more, Georgia smoke shall be our shield: thank you for the many discussions
over the phone and for being one of the few smokers left in this country, Penny let
our music flow: for the gigs we went to see and for those that we are about to see and
also for the poster of Kaligari, Niko for being the only classic orchestral punk I know
and for being the leader, Antoni for the time of onica we spent in the kitchen and for
the image with the flowers and the whiskey, Giorgo for the ride with the van after the
night at the Quarry and for keeping F.D. alive, Tijanna for being supportive, Dimitri
and Petro for the great ride in the North which continues and for bringing me in
contact with the Maestro, Sylvana and Christo for the night of the Road to Nowhere,
Anesti for the Sunday meetings for coffee throughout the years, Vangeli and Maria
for embarking the ship right before the end, Antoni for your music selections that
have been a great Friday companion, the vm crew for keeping the concept of radio
still alive, Saki for being there for more than ten years and for your frequent visits to
Edinburgh, Scott for your support in the Library during hard times, David for being
more than a gentleman. And the absent present: the Vangelis Trinity, My dear
brother Giorgo who keeps putting up with my whims, Vana, Aristh, Michali.

Last but not least I want to thank my father who made it all possible: for his endless
faith, love and support.

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Declaration

I declare that this thesis was composed by myself, that the work contained herein is
my own except where explicitly stated otherwise in the text, and that this work has
not been submitted for any other degree or professional qualification except as
specified.

(Vangelis Makrigiannakis)

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 Table of Contents

Abstract……………………………………………………………………………iii
Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………...v

INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………….1

RECONSTRUCTION / ΑΝΑΠΑΡΑΣΤΑΣΗ…………………………………….25
Reconstruction: the herald of N.E.K. (New Greek Cinema)………………………..25
Greece is not sunny any more………………………………………………………31
The narrative of Reconstruction: Against the system of suture…………………….37
The use of Myth…………………………………………………………………….50

DAYS OF ’36 / ΜΕΡΕΣ ΤΟΥ’36…………………………………………………57

Framing the unsaid………………………………………………………………….61
When two sequences collide………………………………………………………..64

THE TRAVELLING PLAYERS / Ο ΘΙΑΣΟΣ………………………………….75

The narrative of The Travelling Players……………………………………………77
The Epic…………………………………………………………………………….87
Time…………………………………………………………………………………97
Death?……………………………………………………………………………...101
Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………106

THE HUNTERS / OI KYNHΓΟΙ………………………………………………..109

Closing the circle…………………………………………………………………..111
“He was talking to the corpse…I could not overhear what they were saying.”…...123
Back into the snow………………………………………………………………...130

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MEGALEXANDROS / Ο ΜΕΓΑΛΕΞΑΝΤΡΟΣ……………………………….135
The sublime image of Megalexandros…………………………………………….141
Power Over and Power Against…………………………………………………...148
The Dialectic of the Shot………………………………………………………… 157

VOYAGE TO CYTHERA / ΤΑΞΙΔΙ ΣΤΑ ΚΥΘΗΡΑ…………………………169

“One, two…One, two… I’m losing the tempo…”………………………………...172
Objectivity/subjectivity…………………………………………………………….180

THE BEEKEEPER / Ο ΜΕΛΙΣΣΟΚΟΜΟΣ…………………………………..195

A journey to the south……………………………………………………………..197
The drifter………………………………………………………………………….206

LANDSCAPE IN THE MIST / ΤΟΠΙΟ ΣΤΗΝ ΟΜΙΧΛΗ……………………213

The space between...................................................................................................221

THE SUSPENDED STEP OF THE STORK / ΤΟ ΜΕΤΕΩΡΟ

ΒΗΜΑ ΤΟΥ ΠΕΛΑΡΓΟΥ………………………………………………………227
The silence of the chorus………………………………………………………….233

ULYSSES’ GAZE / ΤΟ ΒΛΕΜΜΑ ΤΟΥ ΟΔΥΣΣΕΑ…………………………259

A new beginning? ...................................................................................................266

ETERNITY AND A DAY / ΜΙΑ ΑΙΩΝΙΟΤΗΤΑ ΚΑΙ ΜΙΑ ΜΕΡΑ…………273

To the Sea…………………………………………………………………………293

CONCLUSION: A HISTORY OF RUINATION……………………………....299

FILMOGRAPHY…………………………………………………………………313

BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………...319

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 INTRODUCTION

Imagine that you are sitting in the cinema and the following sequence is projected on
the screen. The sequence starts with an image that shows the front entrance of a hotel
on the side of a lake in a mountainous area. To one side of the hotel lies a pier. The
camera frames the entrance of the hotel and the start of the pier. A group of middle-
aged men together with their wives come out of the hotel with glasses of wine in their
hands and singing merrily, some of them waving their hands to the rhythm of the
tune. Their dress suggests that they all belong to an upper middle class milieu. The
song they are singing is a Royalist anthem in favour of the king of Greece. The group
walk down the few steps in front of the hotel and start moving towards the pier.
Suddenly they freeze and look off screen to the right towards the pier. They remain
there suspended; their singing stops and is replaced by the sound of a harmonica
coming from offscreen towards where they are looking. The camera that had been
still, observing the group from a certain distance, now performs a panoramic
movement towards the right. Through the pan the gaze of the camera bypasses the
pier and then introduces a procession of rowing boats on the lake. All the boats are
carrying red flags. Having left the pier out of frame, the camera now focuses on the
procession of boats that sail by at a certain distance from the edge of the lake. The
sound of the harmonica accompanies the procession. High mountains are visible in
the background. The camera then falls still again as it records the boats as they pass
by before disappearing off screen to the left. The whole sequence is staged in one long
take. A cut ends the sequence.

Welcome to the cinema of Theo Angelopoulos. The sequence described above comes
from his 1977 film The Hunters, a film rarely seen outside Greece yet in my view one
of his most accomplished films. The film tells the story of a group of hunters whose
members are representative types of the new ruling order that emerged after the end of
the Civil War in Greece, which broke out in 1946 and ended in 1949. The film
presents the group as haunted by a past that they are trying to suppress: a past that
erupts continuously into the present in order to foil their attempts to enjoy a feast. The

1
film also serves to remind the viewer that this new ruling order was built on top of
acts of violence and suppression against those who were defeated in the war and
against those who found themselves clinging on to socialist ideals. The sequence
described above is one example of this.

Before giving an overview of this thesis, I would like to explain why I chose to start
with this particular sequence. I believe that all the basic elements that constitute
Angelopoulos’ cinema are condensed into it; it also contains most of the themes that I
will raise throughout this thesis.

The sequence is filmed in one long take. It shows an interconnected action between
two groups in a unified time and space. This action takes the form of a collision. The
group of the rowing boats represents a past which the group of hunters is trying to
suppress. This past nevertheless erupts into the present and forms an event which is
staged in a somewhat monumental fashion. In addition the action takes place in a
natural location. The camera frames the action of the group but it also frames the
space between them. The sequence has a meaning which is there but not directly
given. The camera observes and reveals the action in its process of becoming.

In a manner similar to the juxtaposition of two groups in the sequence from The
Hunters, I would now like to juxtapose the whole sequence with the following quote.
The extract is taken from Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘Theses on the philosophy of
History’.

A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as

though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly
contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are
spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned
toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single
catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in
front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and
make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from

2
 Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel
can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the
future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him
grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. 1

The image from this extract appears before my eyes every time I watch a film of
Angelopoulos. I would not argue that Angelopoulos is consciously visualising or
imitating Benjamin’s text. Yet for me it encapsulates the way I choose to see his films
and it profoundly informs my research. If one chooses to see the action of the Angelus
Novus as one that does not strictly refer to history but rather as a way of seeing which
incorporates a way of treating the past, then I think one finds a very poetic description
of the films of Angelopoulos. Angelopoulos presents us with a cinematic space where
the action unfolds before a camera which observes from a distance, as if it were
contemplating the action. In the sequence from The Hunters, the camera does not
come close to the subjects. It observes from a certain distance. It is as if the camera
does not wish to intervene but rather allows the action to unfold in its full process.
The camera moves of its own accord, contrary to the action. It follows the gaze of the
hunters but then frames the rowing boats from its own point of view, as though
acquiring its own subjectivity. Furthermore it frames the boats as they disappear out
of frame. If we see the boats as the return of a past that is trying to be suppressed it is
the camera’s eye that brings this return to the surface. The rowing boats represent a
catastrophic experience: that of the Greek Civil War. The camera makes this trauma
visible. Yet it cannot stay and do justice to the past. It merely records the trace of a
wound in the present. Like Benjamin’s description of the Angelus Novus, it will move
away, unable to change the course of events. Like the angel of history, the subjectivity
of the camera is not that of an everyday observer. The camera adopts a point of view
that delivers a space of high poetic resonance.

This thesis is not restricted to questions concerning how history is represented in

Angelopoulos, although that is one of its central concerns. This thesis will also aim to
describe a way of seeing that comes through the films of Angelopoulos. It will
demonstrate why Angelopoulos is important not only for the history of film but for

3
one’s modus vivendi. This thesis aims to make a connection between the social and
the cinematic; an attempt which is informed by what Angelopoulos’ films do of their
own accord. In a period where European cinema is receding more and more towards
the framing of the everyday experience, to the minor narratives of individuals, the
road towards neo-liberalism seems to be the only imagined path in the sphere of the
social. At a time when the political regimes of the former socialist states of Europe
have crumbled after their totalitarian identity was laid bare, a totalitarianism that
according to the philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis buried the last remnants of the
project towards social and individual autonomy 2 , and at a time when the ex-
communist countries are chasing after capitalism as a longed-for dream, the films of
Theo Angelopoulos present us with a dream of a different nature. With their eyes set
in the past but pointing towards the future the films evoke a feeling of the need to be
part of a community. His films imply the need to search for alternative ways towards
the future, ways that are not dictated by the laws of the market. In The Suspended Step
of the Stork the main character Alexandros exclaims: ‘How can we find a new
collective dream?’. The films of Theo Angelopoulos are informed by socialist ideals
yet they are not in any way propagators of particular political or social ideas. Still they
raise a flag: that of change. By showing the gaps of inequality and exclusion that run
not only through Greek society but in any given society, his films suggest the
imperative need to ceaselessly reconsider our place in the world both on a personal
and a social level.

In a recent interview, Angelopoulos noted that what interests him is a kind of new
humanism. 3 I believe that this statement reflects the power cinema can have in
changing one’s life. As Angelopoulos said in a personal interview, he has stopped
believing that art can change the world, yet he does not stop making films that deal
with communal issues. This thesis takes into consideration the call to humanism but
approaches the work of Angelopoulos from a multi-theoretical point of view. I believe
it would not be fruitful to stress the affinities between the work of this Greek director
and any single philosophical theory or film theory. The affinities of the images with
calls to social theory or philosophy do not fix the image into a closed meaning, but
rather continue an ongoing dialogue. This thesis draws on theories from diverse

4
thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze, Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, Fredric Jameson
and Cornelius Castoriadis.

In terms of filmmaking I will demonstrate how Angelopoulos’ films defy current

global trends where the imitation of American action-based recipes has led to the
production of a multitude of films where style becomes an end in itself. 4 The films of
Theo Angelopoulos follow a different flow. They include a particular type of
temporality which becomes difficult to follow in cultures which are fully immersed in
speed. A hundred years ago, Benjamin saw the rise of short stories and the
abbreviation of the novel as signifying a reduction in the time devoted to one’s
personal and social activities unless they become labour 5 , an alienating experience in
his eyes. In a similar way, the films of Angelopoulos resist the abbreviation of filmic
time, an act that can also be seen as reflecting a resistance to the abbreviation of our
sense of lingering time in a world of fast consumption. Angelopoulos makes films that
still maintain a three-hour format. He is exemplary in his use of long takes and of the
sequence shot in particular, where one or more actions are included in one take
without a single cut. The long take inscribes in the celluloid the time that takes place
between two actions. It is this time that comes to the foreground as well. Throughout
this thesis I will trace the development of this aesthetic.

As I mentioned earlier, Angelopoulos stages his films in natural settings. Yet his films
do not follow the norms of a naturalist drama where the succession of shots follows a
linear pattern of cause and effect. The sequences carry a strong sense of autonomy
and the emphasis for building the narrative falls mainly onto the mise-en-scène, onto
what happens within the confines of a singular shot. Angelopoulos starts off from a
notion of realism by placing the action of his films in a natural setting, yet this does
not mean that his films reflect an unmediated objective world which lies out there.
One could argue that this is an obvious point since what appears before the camera is
staged. Yet that might lead us to conclude that since Angelopoulos abstains from
editing, all his films are theatrical and the camera merely records passively what is
directed in the mise-en-scène. There are two main factors against such an argument.

5
The first and the more obvious is that the camera in the films of Angelopoulos is in
constant motion. The second lies strictly in the nature of the cinematographic image.

According to the film theorist Gilberto Perez, the cinematographic image is formed
between a play of absence and presence. 6 The image carries with it something of the
world that pre-exists it, a world which is mechanically reproduced onto the celluloid.
Yet this is not an objective rendering of the real, an unmediated shining through of a
material world waiting there to be recorded. Perez follows the thought of American
philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce who saw the photographic image as being both an
icon and an index:

A photograph is both an icon and an index. It is an icon because it gives

an image, a likeness, of the subject it represents. It is an index because it
has a direct connection with that subject, as a footprint has with a foot or
a seismograph with movements of the ground. 7

An index is not a likeness. Pictorial and photographic representation have in common

that they can represent a likeness of the object. But the index of the painting points
towards the painter who represents the world, while the index of the photographic
image points towards the object itself since the light reflected from the object is then
imprinted onto the celluloid. Perez cites Roland Barthes who claims that:

The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real

body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me,
who am here; the duration of the transmission is insignificant; the
photograph of the missing being as Sontag says, will touch me like the
delayed rays of a star. 8

However, according to Perez the likeness of the object depicted is based on

convention. The index of a photograph testifies to the object having been there before
the photographic apparatus, yet this does not mean that the inscription of the object is
unmediated or free of interpretation. Seeing a tree in the cinema is not the same as

6
experiencing the presence of a tree in person. Just as the painting of God in the Sistine
Chapel does not testify to God’s immediate presence but rather rests on the viewer’s
acceptance of conventions to represent something that is absent, so it is that in the
cinema the image of a tree rests on a convention of us viewers accepting its absence
despite seeing the object on the screen. The icon and the index go hand in hand. As
Perez puts it: “The photograph as index bears witness to the reality of its subject, the
photograph as icon is what gives testimony to its being an index of that reality.” 9

We can claim then that the image carries with it a trace of the material world. The
index functions towards the documentary side of the photographic image, being able
to record bodies and objects in space. The cinematographic image bears a trace and an
imprint of its subject, transforming it into something else - into a cinematographic
image. Furthermore, the cinematographic image does not exist in isolation; it is edited
together with other images. In other words the image becomes part of a constructed
world, a world of fiction. Even the most truthful objective image carries the intention
of the operator who intervenes even by choosing where to place the camera. The
image is thus not unmediated. Yet it is the simultaneity of the index and the icon that
led the film theorist André Bazin to speak of this masking of reality by cinema, as
being able to capture an image of the world which becomes animated on screen.10
Bazin spoke of a perfect illusion so he also spoke of a convention of realism. Yet he
saw the staging in depth and the emphasis on the long take as simulating our everyday
perception where the flux of phenomena appears before our eyes. Bazin hailed the
long take over fast editing because he believed that through editing or montage the
reality effect is destroyed and the images function by leading the audience towards
pre-determined reactions. 11 In short the images are manipulated towards particular
meanings and this deprives the audience from investing their own thoughts and
emotions in the image. As Ian Aitken points out:

Bazin’s theory of spectatorship is grounded in the idea that, when the

spectator gazes upon the realistic film image, he or she seeks to both
transcend the contingent forms of knowledge and experience imposed by

7
 mortality and achieve a degree of self-realisation founded on free
thought and action. 12

Bazin is not interested in content. What matters is the sensation evoked by staging in
depth and giving the effect of an outside reality. An example from the films of
Angelopoulos will help clarify this thought.

In a sequence near the opening of his 1986 film The Beekeeper, we witness the main
character Spyros (played by Marcello Mastroianni) who, after attending his
daughter’s wedding, walks across a bridge over a river that passes through the rural
town where he lives. It is close to the end of winter. After crossing the bridge, and
with his back almost fully turned away from the camera lens, he walks close to a tree
in full blossom. The sequence is presented in one long take in which we see
Mastroianni from a certain distance. We as viewers do not see his reaction (if there is
one) when he comes close to the blossom tree in winter. Yet the camera keeps on
recording the man and the tree along with the space around them and it is as if the
sequence has lost its narrative drive, giving way to a sense of autonomy in the image.

We could claim that the image together with its function as an image of a fictional
world also carries a documentary resonance, bringing to the foreground the act of
recording. The sequence conveys very little in terms of plot evolution. The effect is
that the image has been freed from its function as an element of a story and, by giving
the impression of someone who is merely looking at a man walking, evokes the act of
recording. The filming of a location without any cuts brings forth the indexical or
documentary side of the image yet Angelopoulos goes beyond the feel of a
documentary. The persistence in the recording of physical reality brings forth a realm
where the tree acquires another kind of signification which is equally an element of
the fictional world, although it does not have a particular symbolic function in the
drama. It renders a sense of awe that the tree emanates without being a symbol with a
fixed meaning. The world seen through the camera lens is not a world prior to
cinematic representation, yet it carries the trace of a world that pre-exists it.

8
Finally, the persistence in recording without a cut delivers a sense of time that cannot
be measured in terms of a particular movement on frame. The use of a fix frame
which then becomes a tracking shot or a slow pan framing a succession of one or
more choreographed actions, together with the time between those actions or even the
time before and after a singular event, provide a direct image of time passing. The
emphasis lies on the internal rhythm of the shot which evokes a sense of time quite
similar to that described by Andrei Tarkovsky.

For Tarkovsky, who is informed by the theories of Bazin, every shot contains a time
pressure which is then combined with other shots of different time pressure in order to
form an organic whole where one senses a transcendental flow of time. 13 This flow is
transcendental in the sense that it frames the flow of time as moving beyond motive
perception as well as the actions of humans. Furthermore, if the acts of humans make
history then this sense of time gives a sense of permanence that exists in a realm
higher than that of history. This feeling of time can be sensed through nature, which is
why the blowing of the wind or the presence of the rain are so important in
Tarkovsky. They provide a time image which is simultaneously uniquely cinematic
but also aims at transcending the materiality of the medium and making a connection
between humans and the organic rhythms of nature. Nature in the films of Tarkovsky
is constantly opposed to technology which appears as an alienating force. 14

The films of Angelopoulos also contain this time pressure built on the internal rhythm
of the shots. The rhythm is reinforced by the slow movement of the camera, a camera
that moves as if at will, creating a space which quite often becomes circular as the
camera moves through 360 degrees. The camera often brings to the foreground a
material world which does not serve as mere decorum for the action controlled by the
characters. Still, Angelopoulos is not interested in merely recording the flow of life.
The action of his films does not transcend history but is instead deeply involved in it.

Eirini Stathi and John Orr point out that the narratives of Angelopoulos’ films evolve
on a metahistorical realm 15 , meaning that Angelopoulos does not present a historical
documentation of a era in the manner for example of a Costa Gavras film, where the

9
unfolding of the action follows a linear chronological pattern and is situated in an
actual historical period. Gavras (or for that matter Oliver Stone) present us with a
filmic world as a perfect reconstruction of an actual or probable historical period
bound to the laws of cause and effect. Angelopoulos on the other hand makes films
that present a view of a historical period, hence my parallel with Benjamin’s angel of
history. They are involved with history but from a point of view that brings the act of
showing or telling a story through images to the foreground. His films are not faithful
objective recreations of a historical time but rather show a past as seen from the
present. Like the angel of history who is simultaneously inside and outside the event,
the films of Angelopoulos deliver a realm where past and present fuse but are not
indistinguishable. Like the angel, who gazes straight at an event only to move
forward, so the camera in the films of Angelopoulos pauses over an action only to
move away at a slow, contemplative pace.

Angelopoulos creates fictional worlds that are in direct confrontation with history or
become mythical explanations of an era. Unlike Tarkovsky, who believed that the
handling of the image should not deliver predetermined concepts, in Angelopoulos the
image is not bereft of a historically specific meaning. Angelopoulos’ films carry a
double resonance. While recording the unfolding of time and life, the images more
than frequently, aim at the formation of a concept. Still the meaning of an image as
argued above is not directly given. This function strangely enough brings him close to
Sergei Eisenstein’s theory of montage, a theory that Tarkovsky repudiates. I will
discuss this argument in greater detail when dealing with the Trilogy of History and
Megalexandros.

Angelopoulos has stated that there are two main cinematic influences on his work:
Orson Welles for the use of the depth of field and the sequence shot, and the Japanese
director Kenji Mizogushi for the use of offscreen space. 16 The Greek director notes
that although his travelling shot has been directly influenced by Orson Welles,
Friedrich Murnau, the prolific German director of the silent era, and his use of the
tracking shot, has been equally influential. 17 The Hungarian director Miklos Janscó
with whom the director shares many affinities on the use of circular shots has also left

10
an imprint on Angelopoulos as I will discuss in my chapter on Days of ‘36. Yet
Angelopoulos’ work, although it is in favour of an aesthetic based on long takes, is
not entirely foreign to the idea of Eisenstein’s montage. The effect however is
different, as I will demonstrate when I discuss each film individually. Furthermore the
freezing of the action to allow the issuing forth of a different perception of time, along
with the personal journeys of the Angelopoulian hero of the second period, bring the
films of Angelopoulos close to the cinema of Michelangelo Antonioni and the
phenomenological wanderings of his characters. Finally we should add his friend and
contemporary, in terms of filmmaking, German director Wim Wenders. Wenders is
seldom referred to in relation to Angelopoulos, yet his reinvention of the road movie,
his affection for open landscapes, and the search for identity are common features of
both directors’ work, particularly the second period of Angelopoulos. In my analysis
of Angelopoulos’ films I will illustrate how his work relates to the above mentioned
directors in their historical context.

The Films
First Period: Reconstruction – the Trilogy of History - Megalexandros

Angelopoulos has made twelve feature films to date together with one short and an
unfinished documentary. His most recent film, The Weeping Meadow (2004) is not
included in this thesis since it is part of a trilogy that is yet to be completed. His work
can be roughly divided in two periods, a distinction drawn by the director himself. As
Fredric Jameson argues, the first period, which includes the films Days of ’36, The
Travelling Players, The Hunters and Megalexandros, is a direct study on history
where Angelopoulos deals with the major historical events that informed Greece as a
nation from the period starting in 1936 until the end of the seventies. 18 The second
period starts with Voyage to Kythera and includes all the consequent films to date:

11
The Beekeeper, Landscape in the Mist, The Suspended Step of the Stork, Ulysses’
Gaze, Eternity and a Day and The Weeping Meadow. These films turn on a more
personal worldview where the story of each film evolves around a singular character
voyager with the exception of Landscape in the Midst where the major parts are
played by two children.

The first period of the director’s work coincides with the years after the fall of the
Junta of the Colonels in 1974. This was a period characterised by an intense
preoccupation with politics in everyday Greek life, a fact that is also reflected in the
filmic production of the era. Angelopoulos became a prime figure of the so-called
New Greek Cinema. The wave was not entirely political in content nor was it
structurally coherent. It reflected the need for change in the Greek film industry. The
need for changes to the social structure of the country became more intense during the
first years after the fall of the junta. Many filmmakers, including Angelopoulos,
attempted to fulfil a popular demand that remained suspended since the Civil War: to
reclaim history on behalf of those who had been defeated and prosecuted after the end
of the Civil War. This meant the Left in its broader sense but in particular the
Communists, whose party had been declared illegal from the end of the Civil War in
1949 until the establishment of parliamentary democracy in 1974. The claiming of
history had to come through a break with the old motifs of cinematic representation.
The work of Angelopoulos together with the emergence of the New Greek Cinema
appeared in the aftermath of the preceding European wave, the New German Cinema.
Although it would be going too far to make a direct connection between the Greek
director and New German cinema, both movements carry the promise of a break with
the dominant existing trends of film making and film viewing. This promise came
right after the 1968 Cannes film festival and it was the promise of the new. It was the
belief, as expressed in the Estates General of Cinema in Paris in 1968, that a political
cinema cannot be political if it deals only with political issues: a film is mainly
political through its form. 19

Angelopoulos’ first feature, Reconstruction (1970), is set in a mountainous village in

the north of Greece. Angelopoulos bases his story on a real incident whereby a

12
woman and her lover had killed her husband and buried his corpse in the front yard of
the house. The film starts with the husband’s return from Germany where he had been
working as an immigrant. The continuity of the action is then broken however, and
establishes the present tense of the narrative as the period after the murder when the
couple has already been arrested and the police are going through numerous
reconstructions of the killing in order to establish the killer’s identity.

The rural setting of Reconstruction paved the way for almost all the subsequent films
of Angelopoulos, which are set in mountainous areas and the rural landscapes of
Greece. Angelopoulos sets his first film away from cities. As he has mentioned in
interviews he was in search of the “other Greece”, a search that continues today. 20
Until the 1950s, Greece mainly consisted of small rural towns and villages that were
gradually abandoned as people started emigrating to urban centres following the
industrial modernisation of the country. The film becomes a documentation of this
abandonment.

In the chapter on Reconstruction, I will demonstrate how the film becomes a portrait
of a dying land, a portrait that is balanced between documentary and fiction. Taking
Kaja Silverman’s essay On Suture as a starting point, I will juxtapose the narrative
techniques of Angelopoulos with that of a culturally dominant American way of
filmmaking that has its roots in what is widely known as the classical studio system of
the 1930s. Although by the 1970s this classical pattern had been seriously modified in
the States, I believe that its basic principle, that of a cause and effect narrative where
the action is driven around individuals, kept and keeps on formulating the narratives
of mainstream cinema. Angelopoulos instead builds an episodic narrative based on the
dialectics between autonomous sequences that break the continuity of an evolving
action. This juxtaposition of autonomous sequences allows the viewer to become
actively involved in order to establish his/her own reading of the film. In this work, I
will demonstrate how Angelopoulos delivers a filmic world based on long takes
where the filming of the landscape shapes a narrative which frames the main
characters not as prime agents of the action but as subjects that are entangled in a web
of social relations.

13
The films Days of ’36 (1972), The Travelling Players (1975) and The Hunters (1978)
form what is widely known as the Trilogy of History. The Trilogy was then followed
by Megalexandros in 1980. These films dramatise a direct encounter with the events
that have shaped modern Greece as an entity. In the Trilogy of History Angelopoulos
adopts a form of inquiry where there is no psychological identification with the
characters: they are elements of a gaze that maintains a distance from the
consciousness of the characters. Angelopoulos builds his Trilogy of History on a form
based on long takes and long shots. The camera maintains a sense of autonomy from
the action unfolding in the mise-en-scène.

Days of ’36 deals with the last days before the military coup of General Georgios
Metaxas. A prison convict takes his lawyer, who is also a rightwing member of the
parliament, hostage. The narrative evolves mainly inside the prison while negotiations
take place for the release of the hostage. Through a series of travelling and static shots
inside the prison corridors and around the institutional buildings of state power,
Angelopoulos frames a grotesque game of power that seems to be taking place as if
beyond the public’s power to act.

In the chapter on Days of ’36, I look into how Angelopoulos builds up a narrative that
employs a conscious self-censorship in the form of the film in order to protest against
the state of censorship that he himself had been working under whilst making the
film. The film contains long silences where the absence of speech gives way to
choreographed movement, based on the formula of action-reaction. I will argue that
the long take incorporates an inner montage where two actions are juxtaposed in order
to bring a particular concept to the foreground. I will go on to demonstrate how this
montage principle also informs the editing of the film when two autonomous
sequences, each carrying a completed action with a full meaning, are then juxtaposed
for a third new meaning to be born. Finally I will show how Angelopoulos treats
characters as types and is thus able to move from the level of individual narratives to a
wider social sphere and comment on a particular society as a whole.

14
The Travelling Players evolves around the major historical events that occurred
during the period from 1939 to1951. In a way it takes over from where the previous
film ended, leaving aside the years of the Metaxas dictatorship. A band of travelling
players moves through Greece staging the play Golfo the Shepherdess. They witness
and become entangled in the events that marked this period: the 1941 Greco-Italian
war; the Nazi occupation; the British occupation; the American intervention; the Civil
War; the defeat of the Left and the Democratic Army and finally the establishment of
the rightwing government of Papagos, effectively a dictatorship. The troupe is
modelled on myth of the Atreides. In the ancient fable, Agamemnon returns to his
kingdom in Mycenae after the end of the Trojan War only to be murdered by his wife
Klytaimnystra and her lover Aigisthos, who then becomes king at her side. Electra,
the daughter of Klytaimnystra and Agamemnon, endures the rule of the murdering
couple whilst she waits for revenge. Revenge comes in the shape of her brother
Orestes who returns in order to avenge the crime and restore order.

In the chapter on The Travelling Players I will examine how Angelopoulos uses the
structure of the myth of the Atreides and places it in the context of recent Greek
history. I will then follow the thought of film critic Isabelle Jordan who has
characterised the film as Brechtian and explore how Angelopoulos incorporates the
theories of Brecht’s epic theatre into his long take aesthetic. Furthermore I will
demonstrate how Angelopoulos incorporates a time shift that unites two points in time
within the confines of a single long take. This will lead me to examine Angelopoulos’
view of history which I will then parallel with Benjamin’s writings in the Theses on
the Philosophy of History. Finally I will claim that the mise-en-scène of the film
reveals a principle that the theorist Roland Barthes saw as being inherent to the
photographic image. For Barthes the time of the photograph belongs to the it has
been. 21 The stillness of the photographic image makes its subject appear before me as
past and gone, while on the contrary what I see in the cinema is this past animated
through movement. I will claim that Angelopoulos’ staging in the film evokes a sense
of an irretrievable past, a sense that lies very close to the nature of the photographic
image.

15
In The Hunters, a group of hunters in 1977 finds the frozen body of a partisan rebel
which has been preserved intact since the end of the Civil War that ended in 1949.
The group of hunters represents the ruling order that was established after the end of
the war. The dead partisan becomes a psychological wound that forces each diegetic
character into a time lapse that brings up repressed memories and anxieties. The
return of the repressed becomes a means for the director to draw a map of Greece
from the end of the Civil War until the period of the film’s release.

Having argued for the autonomy of the long takes in the films of Angelopoulos, I will
demonstrate how the time shifts in the narrative evolve in The Hunters in relation to
The Travelling Players. I will examine Angelopoulos’ theatrical arrangement of the
mise-en-scène and finally I will relate the sense of autonomy that emerges in the form
through an episodic narrative to the notion of autonomy in the social sphere as
described by the philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis. Seeing how the long takes
incorporate an internal time shift as well as an immanent evolution of the action in
relation to the duration of the shot, I will draw a parallel with a political view that asks
for the immanent movement of a given society towards self-government and change
to its current political status quo.

The last film of Angelopoulos’ first period, Megalexandros (1980), creates an

allegory that comments on the workings of ideology and provides a metaphor for
Stalinism. At the turn of the century, the chief of a gang of bandit-rebels,
Megalexandros, escapes from prison and takes a group of English lords hostage. He
demands the reallotment of the land for his people as he moves north towards a
village where a commune has been established. The army lays siege to the village
while Megalexandros turns from liberator to despot.

With Megalexandros Angelopoulos directly questions the traditional Marxist

revolutionary model that asks for the establishment of an avant-garde subject as the
mediator towards socialism. I will demonstrate how Angelopoulos creates a filmic
world of mythical proportions that draws equally from Greek and European history in
order to form a unique parable on the theme of power. I will also show how the film

16
incorporates visual motifs from Byzantine iconography to the popular shadow play
Karagiozis that emerged under the rule of the Ottomans, blending them with the
director’s personal style. Furthermore, using John Holloway’s notion of anti-power I
will claim that the film presents an image against the fetishisation of power, what
Holloway describes as a power over which separates itself from the social flow. 22

Second period

The second period of Angelopoulos opens up to a different mood. From Voyage to

Kythera onwards the director makes a turn into a more personal view of the world
adopting, the frame of a male hero wanderer and the world seen through his
subjectivity (with the exception of The Weeping Meadow where the main character is
a woman and Landscape in the Mist where we see the world through the eyes of two
children). History in this second period appears as an echo. Angelopoulos continues
his mosaic of modern Greece and his characters embark on a journey that has a
double vector: the one traversing across physical planes and the other launching
towards the psyche of the voyager. Angelopoulos adopts a semi-autobiographical
attitude for the narratives of the second period which is again divided into trilogies,
namely the Trilogy of Silence and the Trilogy of Borders.

Jameson claims that Greece entered a post-historical space after the establishment of
parliamentary democracy in 1974. 23 This is the space that marks Voyage to Kythera.
Jameson’s statement suggests that any popular struggles for a radical change of the
social conditions after that period cease to exist. By the 1980s the abandonment of
rural Greece was complete; the project of the Left was in tatters and the urbanisation
and Americanisation of local culture growing larger. Greek cinema entered its most
critical period with the expansion of the video recorder and the growing problems of a
national industry that was failing to attract wider audiences. Increasingly in the 1980s,
Angelopoulos was the sole representative of Greek cinema at major international film
festivals.

17
Angelopoulos now presents a space of uncertainty. His films turn into what French
philosopher Gilles Deleuze has called the trip/ballad film. 24 The ballad is the story of
a journey, a journey that opens up to what the philosopher has called optical and
sound images that in turn open up to a different perception of time and space. The
journey as a narrative device loosens up the tight narrative frame of cause and effect.
The journey also opens up to an episodic narrative that loses sight of the final
destination. The characters are not the prime agents of the action but instead give way
to an involuntary perception of time. The long take with its persisting, enduring image
creates an energetic field between the character and the space around him.

In his book The Time Image, Deleuze describes the state of affairs that gave rise to
optical and sound situations, thus paving the way for the rise of what he calls the
regime of the time image. 25 After the end of the Second World War and with the
appearance of Italian Neorealism, cinema presented a different image, one in which
the characters become carriers of a gaze in a world of instability where the capacity
for direct action breaks down:

What defines Neorealism is this build-up of purely optical

situations…which are fundamentally distinct from the sensory-motor
situations of action image in the old realism…it may be objected that the
viewer has always found himself in front of ‘descriptions’, in front of
optical and sound images, and nothing more. But this is not the point.
For the characters themselves reacted to situations; even when one of
them found himself reduced to helplessness, bound and gagged, as a
result of the ups and downs of the action. Now the character has become
a kind of a viewer. He shifts, runs and becomes animated in vain, the
situation he is in outstrips his motor capacities on all sides, and makes
him see and hear what is no longer subject to the rules of a response or
an action. He records rather than reacts. 26

The work of Angelopoulos in his post-eighties films can be described using the notion
of the “seer”. The characters record and their passage becomes a passage for the long

18
takes to deliver the space between the audience and what is presented onscreen. The
camera adopts a semi-autonomous point of view, where the subjectivity of the camera
and that of the main camera often intermingle in an indistinguishable oneness.

The Trilogy of Silence

Voyage to Kythera (1984) concerns a young filmmaker, Alexandros, who wants to

make a film about his father’s return from his self-imposed exile to counties of the
Eastern Bloc. He had fled there at the end of the Greek Civil War in 1949 in order to
escape death. He finds the image of his father in a wandering salesman who triggers
the motion of a film inside the film. The old father returns and together with his
family they move to their home village where the inhabitants are about to sell their
land to a company who are planning to build a winter ski resort. The father refuses to
give away his land. He is then arrested by the police for not having a residence permit
and taken to the port, where he is made to get on a raft in the sea in the international
zone waiting for a solution.

Using Pier Paolo Pasolini’s text Cinema of Poetry I will show how Angelopoulos
redirects his aesthetic towards a more personal discourse during this period. I will also
attempt to define the director’s free indirect point of view shot - a term I borrow from
Pasolini - to describe the fusion of the character’s point of view with that of the
director’s, a fusion that dictates the form of the film.

The second film in the trilogy is The Beekeeper (1986). Set in contemporary Greece
the film revolves around the last days of a beekeeper. After his daughter’s wedding
and having retired as a school teacher, Spyros sets out to collect honey from his
beehives at the beginning of spring. On the way he encounters a young female
vagabond and picks her up. The film portrays the dead end between the two and ends

19
with Spyros’ suicide after this last attempt to find a purpose in life fails. In accordance
with the preceding chapter I will show how the director builds a cinematic landscape
which is informed by the discourse of the main character. I will also examine how the
director incorporates long takes based on silence in order to deliver a material death
that refuses to be used as a space of martyrdom that propagates an ideal.

Landscape in the Mist (1988) follows the attempts of two children to trace their father
in Germany. The children believe that Germany is just on the other side of the Greek
border and they can get there by catching the train. In this self- reflexive fable, signs
and characters from all the previous films of Angelopoulos reappear in a space of
uncertainty marked by the silence of the grand ideologies of the Left, represented here
through the absence of the Father. Drawing on Gilberto Perez’s notion of the space
between I will discuss how Angelopoulos constructs a filmic landscape where the
focus lies not in isolated objects in the mise-en-scène but rather in the space between
them. I will argue how this reflects an ideological space that stands between the
lament for and the criticism of past ideals while sustaining the belief in changing
current social conditions.

TheTrilogy of Borders

The Trilogy of Borders starts with the Suspended Step of the Stork (1991). A TV
journalist is preparing a documentary about immigrants who have gathered in a town
near the border. He comes across an old man whose striking resemblance to a
politician who disappeared ten years earlier triggers a quest to prove that it is the same
man. The quest becomes a metaphor for the retrieval of a sense of meaningful
political discourse that could re-establish a loss in communication not only among
nations but within one’s self, if only by a leap of faith.

My approach to the film is to see it as an immanent critique of the political project of

the Enlightenment. I will argue that the film frames the movement of wandering
immigrants as proof of the constructed character of the existing national borders in the

20
Balkans. I will show how, by challenging the dichotomy between reality and fiction,
the immigrant with No Name, played by Marcello Mastroianni, resists a fixed national
or social identity and thus becomes a subject who is in a constant state of becoming. I
will relate this breakdown of the borders between reality and fiction to the form of the
film and claim that the film presents a poetical landscape which sustains the element
of change by remaining open to a multitude of different readings.

In the second film in the trilogy, Ulysses’ Gaze (1995), A. is a filmmaker who
embarks on a journey that starts in Florina in northern Greece and moves through the
Balkans to reach Sarajevo in search of three lost film reels dating from the beginning
of the twentieth century. The film becomes a metaphor for a search for meaning at the
turn of the century after the collapse of the communist states in Europe. The search
for the reels becomes a search for an original gaze; I read the film as an attempt to
bring cinema back to its roots in order to voice a new form of resistance in the face of
what the director sees as empty ‘reconstructions’ of history. Using Deleuze’s notion
of a time image I will illustrate how the director again employs the long take in order
to deliver an aesthetic of affective time that goes against a dominant trend of action-
based political films that function under the aesthetic of abbreviating time.

With Eternity and a Day (1998) the director closes the trilogy. The film focuses on
the last day of a dying writer, Alexandros, before he is admitted to hospital. It is on
that day that he meets an immigrant boy from the Greek minority of Northern Epirus
in Albania. Together they embark on an adventurous journey that takes them from
Thessaloniki all the way to the border with Albania and back again. Alexandros and
the boy traverse a plane where reality, memory and dream intermingle, forming an
image that sustains the dream towards the impossible, as a way of changing what
seems to be a dystopian present. Critics such as Vasilis Rafailidis and Michel Ciment
have associated the films of Angelopoulos with an idea of melancholia. In this thesis,
I will claim a different reading based on Benjamin’s notion of melancholia, where the
remains of the past acquire political connotations and serve to make visible the gaps
of social inequality on a given society. I also view the film through the prism of a
personal loss generating a ghostly presence that allows the lost object to remain

21
hauntingly alive. I will claim that although the film is one of the most personal films
of Angelopoulos it remains highly political, by portraying immigrants not as happy
nomads who move around the globe promoting difference and ignoring national
borders, but as subjects who are more than often reduced to a state of powerlessness.

coda

Angelopoulos is widely considered as one of the great living directors of European

cinema, yet his films are little known in the United Kingdom. However, over the last
few years there has been a growing interest in his work, culminating in a retrospective
held at the Riverside Studios in London and in Edinburgh’s art house cinema
Filmhouse at the end of 2004. Furthermore there has been a growing interest in the
Greek director’s work through the University of Essex where Angelopoulos was
recently awarded an honorary doctorate. This thesis hopes to contribute towards
making his films more accessible not only to a wider audience but also help towards
establishing his films as an indispensable material for study in the curriculum of
departments of film studies throughout the country.

1
Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ in Illuminations, Fontana Press, London,
1992, p. 249.
2
See Cornelius Castoriadis, ‘The Retreat from Autonomy: Postmodernism as Generalized
Conformism’ in World in Fragments: Writings on Politics, Society, Psychoanalysis and the
Imagination, ed. Werner Hamacher & David E. Wellbery, Stanford University Press, Stanford
California, 1997, pp. 38-40.
3
See Andrew Horton, The Films of Theo Angelopoulos: A Cinema of Contemplation, Princeton
University Press, Princeton New Jersey, 1997, p. 196.
4
If one thinks of City of God (2002) by Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund, a film that portrays life in
the Brazilian favelas and then compares it with a film like Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994),
one can see that the way both films choose to tell their stories is in fact quite similar. It could be argued
that the City of God employs a narrative style similar to that of pulp fiction gangster films in order to
show that like in a B-movie, life is unimportant among the gangs in the favelas. The subjects of the
City of God may be imitating American gangsters while immersed in their killings, and the film shows
us exactly this type of alienation, this type of madness. Yet by adopting a narrative style full of visual
effects and culminated action, the film ends up promoting the very type of behaviour it wishes to
criticise.
5
See Walter Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller: Reflections on the Work of Nikolai Leskov’ in Illuminations,
Fontana Press, London, 19992, p. 92.

22
6
See Gilberto Perez, The Material Ghost: Films and their Medium, The John Hopkins University
Press, Baltimore and London, 1998, p. 25.
7
Gilberto Perez, The Material Ghost: Films and their Medium, ibid., p. 32.
8
Roland Barthes cited in Gilberto Perez, The Material Ghost: Films and their Medium, ibid., p.32.
9
Gilberto Perez, The Material Ghost: Films and their Medium, ibid., p.33.
10
See Andre Bazin, ‘The Myth of Total Cinema’, in Film Theory and Criticism, ed. Leo Braudy &
Marshall Cohen, Oxford University Press, 1999, pp. 201-202.
11
See Andre Bazin, ‘The Evolution of the Language of Cinema’ in What is Cinema?, University of
California Press, Berkley and Los Angeles, 1967, p. 34-36.
12
Ian Aitken, European Film Theory and Cinema: A Critical Introduction, Edinburgh University
Press, Edinburgh, 2001, p. 183.
13
See Andrei Tarkovsky, ‘Time, Rhythm, Editing’ in Post-War Cinema and Modernity: A Film
Reader, ed. John Orr and Olga Taxidou, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2000, pp. 186-187.
14
This opposition can be clearly discerned in his film Solaris (1972) where the life of a crew working
on a space station and reaching the borders of their sanity is juxtaposed with the landscape
surrounding the country house of the protagonist’s father on earth, where the elements of nature
acquire an autonomous signification. Rain sprouts out of nowhere and the wind seems constantly
recurrent. Furthermore, in his film Sacrifice (1986), which was set entirely in rural Sweden,
Tarkovsky is contemplating a forthcoming nuclear destruction that would efface humanity from the
face of the earth.
15
See Ειρήνη Στάθη, Χώρος και Χρόνος στο Κινηματογράφο του Θόδωρου Αγγελόπουλου, Αιγόκερως,
Αθήνα 1999, p. 175. See also John Orr, The Art and Politics of Film, Edinburgh University Press,
Edinburgh, 2000, p. 52.
16
Theo Angelopoulos in an interview with Konstantinos Themelis in Κωνσταντίνος Θέμελης,
Θόδωρος Αγγελόπουλος: Το παρελθόν ως Φόρμα, Το Μέλλον ως Ιστορία, Ύψιλον/βιβλία, Αθήνα,
1998, p. 85.
17
Theo Angelopoulos in an interview with Tony Mitchell. Extracts of the interview are included in
Michael Wilmington, ‘Η Δύναμις και η Δόξα’ in Θόδωρος Αγγελόπουλος, ed. Ειρήνη Στάθη,
Φεστιβάλ Κινηματογράφου Θεσσαλονίκης - Εκδόσεις Καστανιώτη, Αθήνα, 2000, p 85.
18
See Fredric Jameson, ‘Theo Angelopoulos: The Past as History the Future as Form’ in The Last
Modernist: The Films of Theo Angelopoulos, ed. Andrew Horton, Flick Books, Trowbridge, 1997, p
88-89.
19
For a detailed discussion of the debates raised in the Estates General of Cinema in 1968 relating to
politics and film form see the chapter Politics in Robert Lapsley and Michael Westlake, Film Theory:
An Introduction, Manchester University Press, Manchester,1988, pp. 1-12.
20
Personal interview with the director, June 2005, unpublished. See also interview with Konstantinos
Themelis in Κωνσταντίνος Θέμελης, Θόδωρος Αγγελόπουλος: Το παρελθόν ως Φόρμα, Το Μέλλον ως
Ιστορία, Ύψιλον/βιβλία, Αθήνα,, 1998, p.142
21
See Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida - Reflections on Photography, Vintage Books, London, (1981)
2000, p. 95.
22
See John Holloway, Change the World without taking Power- The Meaning of Revolution today,
Pluto Press, London – Sterling Virginia, 2002, pp.43-45.
23
See Fredric Jameson, ‘Theo Angelopoulos: The Past as History the Future as Form’ in The Last
Modernist: The Films of Theo Angelopoulos, ed. Andrew Horton, Flick Books, Trowbridge,1997,
p.89.
24
See Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2- The Time Image The Athlone Press, London 1989, pp. 2-3.
25
See Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2- The Time Image The Athlone Press, London 1989, p. 22.
26
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2- The Time Image, ibid, p. 3.

23
24
 RECONSTRUCTION / ΑΝΑΠΑΡΑΣΤΑΣΗ

An immigrant returns to his home village from Germany where he had been a factory
worker for years. The village which is called Tymphea lies in the region of Epirus in
the north of Greece and consists of a group of stone houses at the sides of a barren
hill. Because of increasing waves of immigration, the village’s few inhabitants
consist mainly of small children, women and old men. The emigrant returns
unexpectedly. Within a few days of his return he is strangled to death by his wife and
her lover.

The crime is not depicted on screen. The narrative cuts from the freeze frame of the
first family reunion to a reconstruction of the crime. The police perform a series of
reconstructions of the crime where each one of the accused is blaming the other for
the actual deed of strangling. Each reconstruction is succeeded by a flashback of the
couple in their attempt to set up an alibi, all the way to their arrest.

On a parallel axis, a group of journalists covering the story is interviewing the

people in the village. In the course of the interviews the social milieu comes to the
foreground. At the end of the bureaucratic reconstructions the arrested couple is
taken away in a police van. On the way to the van the women of the village try to
lynch the wife. The film ends with the scene of the murder. The emigrant walks into
his house and closes the door behind him. The camera remains immobile outside the
house while a traditional lament leads to the final cut.

Reconstruction: the herald of N.E.K. (New Greek Cinema)

Shot in 1970, in the middle of the Greek ‘Junta of the Colonels’, Reconstruction was
Angelopoulos’ first long feature. The film was voted one of the ten best features in
the history of Greek cinema by the Pan-Hellenic Association of Film Critics
(Π.Ε.Κ.Κ.) in 1985. 1 It is the film that heightened the tension between the old

25
commercial cinema and the new generation of directors that formed the Greek New
Wave. This tension gradually led to the domination of the new directors in the
Thessaloniki Film Festival during the second part of the seventies and after the fall of
the junta. 2

In 1970 the cinema of the private studios that had reached its heyday in the previous
two decades was approaching its final closure. During the above-mentioned period,
the local film industry succeeded in producing a great number of melodramas and an
even greater number of popular comedies based on farce. The film studios
established a local star system that ensured the commercial success of new releases
while sustaining a continuous and, for the size of the country, enormous production
of films.

Yet all the private studios refused to give way to artistic innovation with the result
that national production was exhausted by endlessly repeating similar motifs in
popular comedies and melodramas. The repetition of these same patterns was happily
welcomed by an audience seeking the comfort of the familiar. By the same token, the
production companies’ huge profit inevitably led to a vicious circle of producing and
consuming stereotypical stories. Any aspiration for an alternative cinema fell short.

There were only a few directors with artistic intentions who managed to fund their
films during that period. Takis Kanelopoulos for instance, with his films
Ουρανός/Sky (1962) and Εκδρομή/Excursion (1967), blends melodrama with a
serious dedication to social realism. With both films evolving around the Greco-
Italian War and the subsequent Nazi Occupation (1941-44), Kanelopoulos presents
his heroes in their attempt to sustain Eros (Love) as a means to transgress a historical
reality that devours them. Aided by elliptical soundtracks based on virtuoso
improvisations on classical guitar, the films can be seen as the two lyrical ballads of
the sixties.

Kostas Manousakis, whose third feature Φόβος/Fear screened at the 1966 Berlin
Film Festival, was gradually marginalised because of his artistic intentions, and was

26
unable to shoot another film. His attempt to strike a balance between commercial
motifs and modernist aesthetics was unacceptable both to the major studios and to
the new directors of the subsequent Greek Wave. In 1966 Alexis Damianos presented
his first feature Μέχρι το πλοίο/To the Boat, a triptych on Greek immigration to
Australia, and laid the foundation for his subsequent masterpiece, Ευδοκία/Evdokia
(1970). He was also marginalised, and was unable to make another film for the next
twenty-five years.

Few were the films that moved beyond the local market. The films of Michalis
Kakoyannis, director of Stella (1955), Zorba the Greek (1964) and Elektra (1962),
were funded by the major studio of Finos Films. However, apart from him, there was
only one director seeking international attention who did not belong to the studio
system: Nikos Koundouros, who produced his first feature Μαγική Πόλις/Magic City
(1955) by himself, and directed Ο Δράκος/The Ogre of Athens, a landmark in the
history of Greek film, in 1956. Koundouros drew a line of authorship from the early
fifties, which was internationally acknowledged, and he was later on awarded the
Golden Lion in the Venice Film Festival in 1962 for his film Little Aphrodites.

Average annual production of films in Greece after the end of the fifties never
dropped below 50. In 1969, more films were made in Greece than in Germany or
France. The average number of films produced in the United States for the second
half of the sixties was 230, while in Greece it varied from 100 to 150. 3 For many
features, the actual film shoot became a matter of a few days. Needless to say, scripts
were written in great haste and the technical quality of the films was extremely
poor. 4

The recurrent themes dealt almost exclusively with petit bourgeois characters trying
to make ends meet. Traditional values like family, marriage, religion and dignity
formed the agenda for characters almost always seen as positive. The portrayal of
social groups was crudely represented through a dichotomy of rich and poor, where
the former appears sinful and envious of the integrity of the poor who, in turn,
always triumph over material concerns. A strong sense of Christian Orthodox values

27
blended with the desire to move upwards on the social scale lies at the core of those
films. As Chrisanthi Sotiropoulou points out:

The pressure to climb up the social ladder as a permanent characteristic

of the petit-bourgeois is at the core of every activity for the Greek film
hero. The small-time racketeers, the bold, the audacious always manage
to win and to survive. Exaggerated emotions and the apotheosis of the
element of chance smooth out hardships and differences creating thus a
situation beyond any social collision and critical stance. Social consent
is treated as something natural and self-evident rather than imperative.
Poverty, injustice, oppression are things presented as natural elements
that the hero has to endure... 5

In the 1960s two major studios dominated the market, Finos Films and Clack Films.
Their films continued the same commercial line of the previous decade where Finos
introduced the musical genre through the films of Giannis Daliannidis, one of the
most commercially successful directors of the period. The industry released its films
through the annual Thessaloniki Film Festival, which was not yet international. The
festival was held every autumn and was supported by a majority of the local stars
who would fly in from Athens to become a major attraction.

With the rise of the Junta of the Colonels in 1967 there was an even greater emphasis
on the glamorous side of the Festival, which now hosted the private shows of film
producer James Paris. His action/war films, set in the period of the Second World
War, and the Western-like pseudo-historical reconstructions of the Greek Revolution
in 1821, favoured the newly-established military regime. Every year the festival
hosted the grandiose promotional shows of Paris, accompanied by luxurious parties
that would occupy the front pages of local and national newspapers. 6

The scene changed in the second half of the sixties when a group of new filmmakers
started to gain ground over the private studios. Theo Angelopoulos, Pantelis
Voulgaris, Stavros Tornes, Tonia Marketaki, Kostas Sfikas and Nikos Nikolaidis

28
were among those directors whose short films marked the presence of the New Greek
Cinema throughout the sixties, and its subsequent victory over the old commercial
studio system at the end of the decade in the middle of the Junta of the Colonels.
Many, including Angelopoulos, worked as film critics for the journal Συγχρονος
Κινηματογράφος (Contemporary Cinema). The journal was launched in 1969 and
was, chronologically, the second film magazine in Greece. 7

There was an attempt in its pages to introduce the medium to an audience not
accustomed to innovation in relation to film; a Sisyphean task addressing an
audience who was only used to the Hollywood-inspired local star system of Finos
Films and to the all family dramas, as the slogan went, of Clack films. In the fifties,
films that are now considered classics were big commercial failures. The Ogre of
Athens, which now figures among the best Greek films of all time, was a commercial
failure at the time of its release in 1956. Even film critics like Kostas Stamatiou, who
belonged to the Left and who later hailed the release of Angelopoulos’ The
Travelling Players, blacklisted the film for its focus on the sub-proletariat as an
allegorical image of Greece. 8

Despite all this, as early as 1962 the Thessaloniki film festival had featured the
short films of the new filmmakers. In that year, although it was still introduced as
Cinema Week in the International Exhibition of Thessaloniki, an event for the
promotion of the industry, the Festival hosted the first short film of the avant-
garde director Kostas Sfikas.

In 1965 Koundouros shot Vortex in the context of a cinematic European

Modernism that erupted at the end of the fifties with the advent of the French New
Wave. Vortex was made in Paris. Nevertheless the film was censored in Greece
and destined to be released only after the fall of the junta in 1974. In 1967 Dimos
Theos directed Kierion, the film that revealed the presence of the New Greek
Cinema. The film featured most of the directors of the new generation in cameo
appearances. Kierion, similarly fell prey to censorship because of its political
content and was likewise screened at the Thessaloniki Festival as late as 1975.

29
The rise of the junta put a stop to what seemed to be an upcoming wave of
modernisation already made present in the Festival of 1966. Still, with the launch
of the film journal Contemporary Cinema in 1969, the second film journal in
Greek history as I have already noted, and with the growing acceptance of the
short film directors by an audience ready for a new vision, a radical change in
Greek cinema became imperative.

Reconstruction was screened in an overcrowded auditorium in the Thessaloniki

Film Festival in 1970. 9 The New Wave had officially produced its first feature. In
1971 the film critic Vassilis Rafailidis published an article called “The
Prerequisites for the Development of a New Greek Cinema” which aimed at
revealing the presence of new filmmakers. Rafailidis declared the independence
of the medium from the imperative to produce films that were technically perfect.
The director was seen as an artist whose technical skills are not of prime
importance:

The perfect lighting, the smooth movement of the camera, the faithful
make-up are not necessary in order to express with images…A perfect
racore is less significant than the directing of the actor’s movements
inside the frame. 10

Cinema should be liberated from the norm of showing things right, meaning the
subordination of the form to a plot-driven narrative with a fixed meaning. The
director should not be a skilled story-teller, but a person who strives and fights for
the destiny of the world. He must not produce fairytales. The audience should grow
accustomed to dealing with alternative narratives that deviate from the norm of a
classical dramaturgy defined by the pattern of beginning – middle – climax –
solution. The plot should be treated as a pretext for the exposition of a problem. 11

Of course the above lines echoed the Cahiers du Cinema fifteen years earlier. 12 In
the words of Rafailides, the director was seen as a visionary artist, one who needs to

30
have absolute control over the means of his/her production. The functions of the
scriptwriter and that of the director should blend to underscore the rise of the auteur.
Angelopoulos came to typify this tendency. Soon though what was intended to
become a ‘wave’ was reduced to a small group of singular auteurs including, among
others, Theo Angelopoulos, Nikos Panayiotopoulos, Pantelits Voulgaris and Lakis
Papastathis.

It could also be argued that these directors never really formed a wave since their
aesthetic and thematic choices were quite diverse. One thing is certain though and it
should be considered seriously. These directors all saw their break from the old
commercial cinema as a common denominator. Furthermore, they all helped each
other in the production of their low budget short films in the sixties, and their first
features in the seventies. For Angelopoulos, his first feature Reconstruction would
signal the start of something new in the same way as The 400 Blows represented a
turning point for French cinema and Yesterday’s Girl for the New German Cinema.

Greece is not sunny any more

Shot in black and white, the film starts with an extreme long shot of a bus
approaching from the far left of the frame until it falls into a pond of water and gets
stuck in the middle of a wide dirt road. The bus is immobilised while the camera
observes from a certain distance, in a manner such that the frame is not dominated by
the sheer bulk of the object. The point of reference in a single shot becomes the bus
with the surrounding dry landscape. The emptiness of the dirt road is surrounded by
naked mountain peaks under a rainy sky.

The script describes the road leading to the village thus: “The water-ponds, the mud,
the gray sky and a line of electricity poles are carving the way of this impassable
road.” 13 Immediately we are introduced to the Angelopoulos’ “atmosphere”, framing
Greece in a totally novel way from how this country has up to now been portrayed in
cinema. Reconstruction is a film that runs against the stereotype of Greece as a

31
beautiful Mediterranean country bathed by the warm rays of the sun and surrounded
by the majestic blue of the Aegean Sea, a formula often recreated in Hollywood. 14
The story takes place in Tymphea, a small village at the sides of a mountain in Epirus
in the north of Greece. The voiceover commentary of the first shot is explicit:

Tymphea: a village in the Tymphi County in the region of Ioannina in

the compartment of Epirus. It is situated beyond the mountain of
Tomaros where the ancient Tymphea was. The extant remains of
Pelasgian walls signify that Tymphea was inhabited from ancient times.
– Population according to the 1939 census…1250 - Population
according to the 1965 census…85.

The village consists of a few stone houses in a mountainous area with no real
agricultural ground. Communication with the closest city is via a dirt road, as we see
in the opening sequence. The emphasis in the narrative on the surrounding landscape
increases the sense of isolation. Throughout the film, the village’s remaining
inhabitants are portrayed with a crude realism. Most of them are old and those who
are still middle-aged dream of a getaway. Before the titles come up, we see the figure
of a man approaching the village with a suitcase on his arm. It is the father, a symbol
for the increasing wave of immigration to European countries, Australia, and Canada
that took place during the fifties and the beginning of the sixties due to economic
depression in Greece.

While the father walks among the stone houses, a lament is heard offscreen. The
mise- en-scene reveals a dry landscape in the winter. It is this wintry landscape that,
once established, dominates the rest of the film. The film evolves through a series of
flashbacks where the clouds and the rain are dominant, contrasting with the winter
sun of the narrative’s present tense. The black and white photography of Giorgos
Arvanitis portrays a sun that does nothing but reveal the shadows of a barren land,
where black- clothed figures walk sporadically in the streets. They come together
only once and then it is only the women, when they are about to lynch the
‘murderess’ at the end of the film.

32
These are images certainly not to be found in the foreign productions that were being
shot in Greece at this time. Hollywood often reproduced an image of Greece as a
summer paradise whose inhabitants were reduced to caricatures in the eyes of the
traveller. A film like Never on Sunday (1960) portrays Melina Mercouri as the iconic
individual who creates her own world to the point of forming a cult among the men
in the port of Piraeus. As opposed to portraying Melina Mercouri’s character as an
agent of female emancipation, the film conforms to all the norms of a Hollywood
narrative production.

In the warm bright atmosphere of the South, the star can be framed in close up and
the individual pride in her gaze can overwhelm the eyes of the spectator. Aided by
the musical theme of Manos Hatzidakis, which adds a folkloric undertone to the
image, Mercouri becomes an iconic image of the force of nature. The foreign
traveller, a man of letters, is naturally captivated by her wild female character. The
film plays on the stereotype of the repressed male westerner who encounters the
other as the agent of an organic life that lies closer to the instincts and intuition, thus
someone who leads a more authentic life. The main character in the film suffers in
order to gain Mercouri’s love until he undergoes a cathartic experience by
resurrecting his macho identity with the aid of other real Greek men. The
transformation cannot but lure the object of desire and lead to a final chorus rejoicing
in life.

War epics like the Guns of Navarone (1961), in turn, portray the Greek partisans as
archetypes of heroic bravery. The landscape, in a manner of a James Bond film, is
reduced to being furniture for the action or is framed as a tourist attraction. Co-
productions between the Greek studios and Hollywood functioned within the same
general framework. Zorba the Greek (1964) by Kakoyannis, although based on the
book by Nikos Kazadzakis, does not escape the Hollywood stereotypes. All the main
characters are played by non-Greek English-speaking actors. The existential
enquiries of the author are removed in favour of a narrative that moves the action
forward. Anthony Quinn exhausts his virtuosity, delivering a hyperactive

33
performance. But what remains of his character, through no fault of his own, is a
man for whom it is sinful to decline a woman when she offers to sleep with him.
Quinn finishes the film with a dance of his own invention, and heralds the attraction
of millions of tourists for decades to come, becoming an icon for restaurateurs.

These are not innocent images. They portray the politics of Hollywood where the
other is familiarised through its identification with typified characteristics and the
represented is deprived of its uniqueness. This is a path that according to Roland
Barthes leads to the birth of the petit bourgeois. In addition, national identity is
attached to a subconscious chauvinism. As Barthes notes:

Petit Bourgeois is a man unable to imagine the Other. If he comes face

to face with him, he blinds himself, ignores and denies him, or else
transforms him into himself. This is because the Other is a scandal
which threatens his essence…There are, in any petit-bourgeois
consciousness, small simulacra of the hooligan, the parricide, the
homosexual…sometimes – rarely – the Other is revealed as
irreducible…there is here a figure for emergencies: exoticism. The
Other becomes a pure object, a spectacle, a clown. Relegated to the
confines of humanity, he no longer threatens the security of the home. 15

In the world of Reconstruction the Greeks are far from being filmic Zorbas. There is
no hint of the innate characteristics of the heroic bravery of war-film propaganda or
of the picturesque villagers that occupy the popular comedies made in Greece in the
period of the junta. Eleni, the main character of the film, suffers in silence. She does
not have the stature of a star. Her short and stout body, as Sergio Arecco notes,
becomes part of a hyper-realistic fresco of fossils and remains. 16

For the Italian theorist the black and white photography, the neo-realistic settings, the
use of actual villagers are all dictated by the subject of the film. The film becomes an
allegory for the disintegration of the cradle of an indigenous culture brought about by
the ruthless capitalisation and urbanisation of a country where violence erupts in a

34
reactionary crescendo in the face of rationalism. 17 The crime occurs beyond reason.
Yet we should note here that the cradle of the indigenous culture that Arecco sees in
the life of a village is also sited in a small patriarchal society where human emotions
are constantly repressed.

The stone houses become the other face of Greece. It is a face that makes its way to
the big screen as an open wound together with the barren mountains echoing the
mourning songs that run throughout the film. Angelopoulos portrays a part of rural
Greece that was forgotten even by Greeks themselves while they were caught up in
their petit bourgeois dreams. As he himself so often emphasises, the film is an
attempt to film this Other Greece. 18 The sea, often used as a sign of redemption in
films, is nowhere to be seen.

This other Greece, the interior rural Greece, was not part of the environment in
which Angelopoulos grew up. He was born in Athens in 1935. His father was the
owner of a mini-market. Angelopoulos studied law: he finished his exams but never
received his diploma. In 1959 he joined the army for his two years of compulsory
service, and due to his higher education he was placed on a committee for the
recruitment of infantry men. This position offered him the opportunity to travel
around Greece, and it is here that he had his first encounter with the rural mainland. 19
In an interview with Konstantinos Themelis, Angelopoulos noted that he belongs to a
generation that grew up in a growing urban environment. 20 It is an environment that
paid little or no tribute to rural areas of the country. It is this rural Greece that would
host the action of most of his films.

After completing his first short film, Η Εκπομπή/The Broadcast (1968),

Angelopoulos was approached by Giorgos Samiotis, a film technician, who offered
to produce his next film. Angelopoulos accepted. He had conceived the script for
Reconstruction as early as 1965. The story is based on a real incident that took place
in the north of Greece, where a woman murdered her husband with the aid of her
lover. 21 It was a story which received little press coverage, but, as the director

35
remarks, there was an exquisite detail that made the case something out of the
ordinary.

After strangling the husband, the woman had buried the body in her front garden and
had then planted onions on top. 22 It is this detail that triggered the director’s interest.
As Konstantinos Themelis writes in his account of the production history of
Reconstruction, Angelopoulos asked the writer Thanassis Valtinos to help him with
the script. 23 Both men, together with Giorgos Samiotis as the producer, traveled to
Corfu, where the case had been tried, in order to gain access to the judicial deeds.
What followed was a trip to the village where the crime actually took place. The
arrival of the group brought turmoil to the villagers as they felt ashamed at what had
happened to their community. On returning to Athens, Valtinos backed out of the
project and Angelopoulos turned to theatre writer Stratis Karras, but, as he notes, the
story was already structured, it was complete. 24

Angelopoulos set the action in the village of Tymphea, which lies close to the village
where the crime was committed. He had searched for locations on his own while
traveling on public buses. The film was shot on a very low budget of 350,000
drachmas in 1970, which would be the equivalent of £750 today. Giorgos Arvanitis,
the cinematographer, and Christos Paligianopoulos, the executive producer, were
equally involved in the production of the film, together with Angelopoulos and
Samiotis. The latter financed the film from his weekly salary as technician in a James
Paris production. During the shoot he stayed in Athens, sending his weekly
paychecks to the shooting crew in Tymphea.

The crew was no more than the above-mentioned, plus Mikes Karapiperis, the set
designer. Angelopoulos cast Toula Stathopoulou, a non-actor and a dressmaker, in
the main role. Christos Totsikas was selected to play her lover. Angelopoulos
specifically did not want a professional actress for the main role: his impression was
that “they all seemed to wear make up from their previous parts in the theatre.” 25
Stathopoulou was herself an emigrant from a village who had come to Athens for a
better future like many of her generation. Angelopoulos remarked that she did have

36
the air and the manners of a city dweller. 26 But as soon as she put on the villager’s
clothes and, finally, when she dyed her hair back to her natural black colour it was as
if another self emerged. The girl from the village reappeared. The shoot lasted for
twenty-seven days with the crew working eighteen hours a day. Nobody has ever
made a profit from Reconstruction.

The narrative of Reconstruction: Against the system of suture

As noted above, Reconstruction heralds the start of a new cinema in Greece.

Angelopoulos has one foot in Tymphea and the other in the Cinémathèque in Paris. 27
It was in Paris that he was introduced to the works of cinematic movements such as
the French New Wave, but also to the work of director-auteurs such as Michelangelo
Antonioni, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Jean Luc Goddard. He was also acquainted with
the works of the Japanese director Kenji Mizogushi, whose influence is more
apparent in his next film Days of ’36.

Angelopoulos was also impressed by the films of the German auteur of the silent era,
Friedrich Murnau, for his use of long takes. It is through this context that the Greek
director’s work appears in the history of cinema. To the foregoing we should add the
historical context of an existing junta that made it imperative for Greek filmmakers
to become inventive in order to avoid the imposed state of censorship. In addition,
the low production budget also had a direct influence on stylistic choices. The
tracking shots that were present in The Broadcast are absent in Reconstruction. The
cost of carrying tracks would have exceeded the budget of the production. Instead,
Angelopoulos builds the film through a series of static frames alternating with
panoramic shots and hand-held camera movements.

Angelopoulos uses black and white photography and it is as if Reconstruction

delivers an image of rupture. It is as if the absence of colour tears down the veil of
mimesis of an external reality and brings forth the reality of the photographic image.
It was Roland Barthes who remarked that black and white photography goes hand in

37
hand with the modern since the intervention of the mechanical eye is inscribed in the
image. 28 The image becomes thus self-reflexive. Colour in a way is more mimetic,
disavowing the act of the camera’s presence.

The black and white photography no longer hosts an idyllic rural landscape as a
pretext for a popular comedy or a sentimental melodrama. Now it becomes a
documentary index of the ruins of a local community. The image delivers a contrast
which is embedded in the form of the film. The mechanical eye of the camera as a
technological product meets the poverty-stricken village which is itself unused to any
sense of progress and technological advancement. It is this contrast that will speak
the truth of this community: an impending death in the face of modernity. Even if it
is abandoned in the later films of Angelopoulos, the black and white image now
becomes a tool for an inquiry into the other Greece: a tool that tears down the veil of
universal progress with the advent of technology.

The opening shot of Reconstruction shows a bus getting stuck in the mud as it goes
up a rural road. The passengers go out into the rain. We see them as they start
walking aimlessly around the bus observing their surroundings while some of them
are engaging in small talk. Two of the passengers open their umbrellas; others raise
their coats over their heads to take cover from the rain. The narrative cuts to a small
group that begins pushing the bus while the driver starts the engine until they finally
set the bus in motion.

A cut takes the narrative to the streets of a village where a man with a suitcase is
seen walking up an alley. This is obviously one of the passengers. Nevertheless, the
opening sequence is not a functional cue for the establishment of the action. The film
could have just as well started with the man’s walk in the alley or with the arrival of
the bus. The suitcase that he carries would be enough of a signifier for him being a
traveller.

The sequence of the bus has no particular narrative function. It becomes what Gilles
Deleuze has called an optical image: 29 The optical image is not a pictorial image. It

38
goes beyond the rendering of a historical ‘real’ that is captured by the lens of the
camera. It goes beyond the ‘look at the buses they were using in those days’.
Angelopoulos immediately makes a connection with a free narrative realism that
appears through Italian Neorealism and would be reinvented by the French New
Wave, and by directors like Antonioni and, later on, by the directors of the New
German Cinema. Still, we are not claiming here the universality of a free plot
narrative that brings about the same effects when applied in film. In the opening
sequence of Reconstruction, the distance of the photographic lens from the diegetic
characters and the absence of drama (the passengers are pushing the bus through the
mud while others move further to stretch) focuses the attention onto the photographic
image. Yet the image deprived of the action is not merely a beautiful composition of
light and shadow. The passengers on the bus are far from beautiful. They are poorly
dressed in dark clothing and their stature is quite small.

According to Gilles Deleuze, what separates a pure optical image from a pictorial
image is the subordination of the former to the rendering of time. 30 The image opens
up to a new reading that includes the time of the viewer’s perception of the image.
What is this that I am seeing now? The experience of watching a film abandons the
linearity of a cause and effect system. Something goes along a dirt road and chances
are it will get stuck in the mud. The director no longer offers a clear story for
consumption. The pure optical image is open for a multitude of readings. The
director embarks on a bus, and the viewers are asked to contribute to set the meaning
of the film in motion as Jameson points out. 31

The train of the Lumière brothers shocked the audience out of the projection room.
The train of the Western film, a sign for the advent of modernity captures the
triumph of the pioneer over the Wild West, the glory of Man as the bearer of the
action. Now the train is an old bus. The images lose their subordination to the
movement that holds the narrative. The viewer is asked not to follow but to
dialectically relate to the image that includes his/her time of perception. This is a
notion that returns in all of Angelopoulos’ films, as if every film is a reopening of the

39
same angst, a rendering of time that seeks to incorporate the viewer’s investment for
the extraction of meaning.

The murder case could run as a pretext for the unravelling of a crime story but the
director uses it to make an inquiry which is different in nature. The most typical
feature of crime films is the build-up of tension through either a chase or the solving
of a riddle. The riddle is crucial to a narrative that concentrates on an investigation,
which in turn unfolds bits and pieces of the enigma until the truth is exposed. The
order that was ruptured in the beginning of the film is restored in the end through the
revelation of the truth.

In Angelopoulos’ film, however, the guilty are identified from the very start. With
the apprehension of the murderers, the director immediately abandons a crucial
technique to keep the audience alert. Reconstruction starts off with the return of the
emigrant. After his encounter with his wife and his three children the narrative
frames the first supper they have as a family after five years. The frame freezes and
the titles are superimposed on the screen. The first shot after the titles is an interior
shot of a man walking into the house of the emigrant. As he makes his way into the
second room from where the shot is taken, a rope is suddenly passed around his neck.

The movement is not completed. The voice of the police captain is heard offscreen.
What the audience is watching is not the actual crime. It is a reconstruction made by
the police. The shot after the titles carries a twist that is analogous to those of Alfred
Hitchcock. The viewer’s terror is aroused, as he/she is surprised at the sudden
appearance of the rope, only to be disillusioned by the voice of the police captain. It
is a play on the viewer’s expectations to downplay the rise of suspense. As Giannis
Bakogianopoulos points out:

This artifice is used only once in the beginning of the first

reconstruction, just in order to preclude every sense of identification,
using a shock that is the foundation of convention, to the fraud of the
scene. It is impossible to have suspense through reconstructions. 32

40
The time sequence of murder – investigation – arrest is reversed. The arrest has
already occurred. The present tense of the narrative is that of the reconstructions,
where the police are trying to identify the strangler between the two suspects. On a
parallel level, we see a group of three journalists covering the story. Their inquiry
consists of interviewing other villagers and taking images of the dead man’s children
and of the murdering couple.

The present tense of the narrative is broken by the intervention of flashbacks where
we see the couple in their attempt to set up an alibi until the moment of their arrest.
The audience has been deprived of their agony for the future of the main characters.
The flashbacks are presented in the form of autonomous episodes. First we see the
attempt to hide the body (Eleni buries it in the garden of her house), and then we
witness the attempt to set up an alibi. The two lovers travel to Ioannina, the rural
guard pretending to be the husband who has decided to go back to Germany.

The third episode involves the rise of suspicions and the arrival of the police until
Eleni’s brother gives her away to the police. Then the narrative returns to the present
from where we witness the last reconstruction. After the couple has been put inside
the police van, the narrative makes a loop into the past and ends with the scene of the
murder taking place offscreen. We see the father entering his house and then the
lover comes and enters the house with Eleni. We are left outside watching the
children playing in the front yard.

As is apparent from the above, the narrative proceeds back and forth in time in an
unconventional manner. The inverted commas used in order to establish the present
as a point of reference and signifying the flashback as part of a subjective discourse
are absent. In mainstream film practice, the recounting of a story by a film character
is the act that justifies the time travel. The flashback is inserted between the same
spaces, so that the spectator knows when the flashback has ended. Conventionally,
the narrative returns to the same shot that triggered the flashback. The transition in

41
and out of the flashback is most typically depicted through the use of
superimposition or the use of fade-out.

The transitions in Reconstruction are very different. The first reconstruction ends
with the shot of the chalk template on the floor, while the voice of Eleni is heard
offscreen, recounting the act of strangling and naming her lover as the actual
strangler. This is the end of the second sequence. The third sequence opens with a
night shot of the house from outside. Footsteps are heard off screen as a man enters
the frame from the right, making quickly his way into the yard. There is a cut in an
interior shot of Eleni in the kitchen when she hears a knock on the door. She opens
and the rural guard appears.

The narrative does not establish the sequence in relation to the action that precedes it.
Does it make sense if the two lovers meet after their arrest? The answer comes in the
next two shots, where the couple climbs down to the basement to find the body. The
narrative has moved backwards in time. After Eleni buries the body in the front yard,
she announces to her daughter that her father has returned to Germany. This is the
end of the first flashback.

The beginning of the fifth sequence returns to the present just by cutting into the
outside space of the house where the second reconstruction is about to start. Again
the viewer is deprived of the sense of authority of the image. The resulting order of
the shots is puzzling. On the first viewing of the film, it is almost impossible to trace
the time transitions from the very start. The only hint given is the change in the
lighting of the scenes. All sequences that take place in the present are shot in strong
daylight, while the episodes of the past are either shot at night or in cloudy weather.

As mentioned above, a typical crime story focuses on the forward progression of the
action towards a final climax. The arrangement of the shots composes a system that
aims at setting the narrative in motion. Starting off from the use of shot reverse shot
and following a linear pattern of causality where the main characters are the prime
agents of the action, the narrative progresses and the spectator is entangled in a

42
system that increases his/her sense of lack of the hidden Other. This is the narrative
style of the classical Hollywood drama of the 1930s that theorists like Jean Pierre
Oudart, Steven Heath and Kaja Silverman described as the system of suture. 33

According to Silverman, the system of suture is a semiotics of objective shots

alternating with subjective points of view in order to produce a linear realistic
narrative: a linear pattern of successive shots that justify each other. A seemingly
objective shot is attributed as the point of view of a character who in turn appears in
as the carrier of the gaze in the next shot. Alternatively, in the case of the shot
reverse shot, each shot is attributed to the point of view of a diegetic character. As
the argument goes, the enunciative act of the camera is thus attributed to a diegetic
character. It is falsely enclosed within the diegetic world that appears autonomous
and complete in the eyes of the spectator. 34

The presence of a shot as free from the point of view diegetic character threatens the
identity of the world of fiction as a natural closed system. By facing an objective
shot, the viewer realises his limitation as viewer. He/she is allowed to see only what
is on frame. By placing the shot as the point of view of a character that is in turn
revealed in the next shot, the threat of the floating gaze is disavowed. The presence
of the camera is concealed. The viewer is always in search for more visual space.
According to Kaja Silverman the system of suture is where “desire is always in a
lack and so always lacking. The play of desire is a ceaseless lack of satisfaction of
desire’. 8

The shot never focuses on the present. It is either a referent for the next shot or a
fragment of the restoration of a final order. The arrangement of the shots conceals the
space that surrounds them only to reveal it in consecutive order. One shot refers to
the next and the spectator sees it as a point of reference for the next. The cut
guarantees the function of a cause and effect syntax.

The philosopher Slavoj Žižek, however, claims quite rightly that there has never
been a film built purely on the shot reverse shot. He maintains that what classical

43
Hollywood narrative is doing is actually an attempt not to have each objective shot
reinscribed as the subjective point of view of a character, but to firmly allocate each
subjective shot to some subject within diegetic reality. The threat is of a point-of-
view shot that will not be subjectivised. The threat lies in a point-of-view shot that
has no subject like the close-up of the investigator’s face in Hitchcock’s Psycho
where the man is framed from above falling down a staircase after being stabbed by
Norman Bates dressed as his mother. This is not an objective shot. It is a shot that
evokes the spectre of a free-floating gaze. 35

During the second reconstruction, the rural guard blames Eleni for the act of
strangling. He claims only to have been holding the victim still. The reconstruction
finds him and a police officer looking down the shaft which the two murderers used
to get the body into the basement. After they are framed in an objective medium shot
from the right looking down, the film cuts to a shot taken from below, from where
they are staring up only to return their own gaze. Instead of us looking through their
eyes down the shaft at what they see, we meet their gaze directly from below. The
confines of the shaft double frames the figures and the uncanny effect is that of
looking from within a grave. It is as if the dead man were looking up from where he
was disposed.

This is an impossible subjectivity, the point of view of the dead, as in Carl Dreyer’s
early sound film Vampyr (1932), where a tracking shot simulates the point of view of
the dead carried in a wagon. In Reconstruction the camera, after returning the gaze,
retreats to the right only to reveal that the gaze belongs to another policeman, looking
from where the camera was initially standing. Yet he is still within the same shot.
The uncanny effect has been downplayed only to be intensified by another. The
camera has thus acquired an autonomous subjectivity that inquires and can move
around at will. The system of a safe concrete world that unravels before our eyes is
shattered.

This is evident already from the first reconstruction when without a cut the point of
view is inscribed in two characters only to downplay their authority. A shot from

44
within the house reveals someone approaching from outside. The camera is not fixed
on a tripod and we can feel its shakiness. Its close framing of the window gives the
impression of someone looking outside from very close to the window frame. A
sudden pan of the camera to the right without a cut reveals the profile of Eleni almost
in close up peeking outside as if hiding. Again what seemed to be her point of view
is inscribed to another.

It turns out to be the head inquisitor. We are in the world of reconstructions. Again
the uncanny feeling of a floating gaze is present. This gaze shifts from one diegetic
character to another as if mapping a battle for the truth. The sequence is shot on a
hand-held camera. It is not to render the movement of the inquisitor. His gaze is soon
abandoned but the camera is not fixed in an objective frame. It moves about in the
scene picking up its own cues: for example, it tilts and we see the chalk template on
the ground without being authorised by a diegetic look.

Throughout the whole film we get the feeling that the camera does not narrate a story
that once happened. We also feel that the camera is not just a mere witness as in a
court case. The camera is not outside the diegesis it is describing. It is right there:
intervening, staging, missing the plot, observing from a distance or from proximity,
as, for example, when in the second flashback the male lover meets Eleni under her
window. The arrival of a motor van draws the camera’s attention from the couple to
its noise. When it pans back to the scene it is only to find that the lover, Gikas, has
left. It makes a further move to the right, without a cut, placing him back in the frame
momentarily as he hastily leaves in the distance.

The camera thus reveals the presence of an inquiring Other that moves in and out of
the diegesis. Quite often it can take on menacing connotations revealing the angst of
being watched. The long-distance shots of the couple in the open landscape in their
attempts to meet in secret are not just a distancing from the diegesis in order to
reflect. They are also the presence of a gaze that watches.

45
Angelopoulos’ editing technique rules out a sense of suture through its emphasis on
an episodic narrative where the sequences retain a sense of autonomy. In accordance,
the camera takes on an autonomous subjectivity from the world of diegesis. In the
introduction to this thesis, I mentioned the word ‘autonomy’ in relation to the long
takes in Angelopoulos. But that wasn’t to signify a closed system of interpretation. It
is, rather, the autonomy of the shots in relation to the progression of a plot based on a
cause and effect system that brings about the start of a dialogue with the audience.

A time lapse functions as an autonomous episode that does not affect the procession
of events in the present by its place in the narrative of the film. Any sequence that
narrates events in the past could be easily displaced without any effect to the logical
order. The film would still make perfect sense. In Reconstruction the spectator is
forced to examine the process of the narrative rather than wait for the ending.
Through the repetitive questioning of the time and the space of the sequences that
move back and forth in time, the spectator focuses on the now of the shots. The
question is reversed from what is going to happen next? to a questioning of the shots
in relation to each other. It is a form of a dialectic inquiry.

The actual crime story is not of interest if presented as an action film searching for
psychological motives that will close the narrative. Within a single shot the actor’s
movement is given space to develop in time. Instead of framing their faces in close
up as a means of portraying their emotional state, the camera concentrates on the
movement of the actors. However, this movement, instead of being a vessel of
emotions ready to explode, becomes one element in the state of relations that
constitute the image. The meaning of given acts is not spelled out.

In the final reconstruction Eleni drops the rope at the feet of the inquisitor. It is a
symbolic act. Yet, although powerful and direct in its tension, it does not make for
identifying a single reading. Does the act signify Eleni’s refusal to speak or does she
throw the guilt back to the male inquisitor? The scene is carried out in three shots.
The inquisitor insists on finding out who was the one to pull the rope. After a pause,
Eleni attempts to strangle him, but the police officers detain her. Back in her starting

46
position she is trying to catch her breath. She then throws the rope at the inquisitor’s
feet.

It is tempting to read this final gesture as an act of rebellion against an established

figure of dominance. It is and then again it is not. A close up on the face of the
actress could offer extreme dramatic tension. Angelοpoulos’ method, though, aims at
downplaying the arousal of extreme emotions. The scene is carried out in medium
long shots where the camera takes the place not of a participant but of a witness. The
actress does not utter a word throughout the scene, thus adding to the dynamic of her
movement. The symbolism, then, does not belong to a universal space where the
signifier corresponds to a fixed signified. The sequence retains an element of free
play in interpretation. Although it reveals a tension, the emphasis on the movement
does not offer a direct explanation of why the woman charges against the inquisitor.
Is it an impulse or is it, finally, a conscious act?

Many scenes in the film have been deprived of their dramatic tension. The extreme
and medium long shots together with the absence of interior monologue and
excessive dialogue between the main characters place the viewer at a distance from
the characters’ psychology. The scene between Eleni’s mother, Lambrini, and the
rural guard Gikas, the Eleni’s lover, takes place in the middle of an open road while
the camera is placed more than ten meters away from the characters. Furthermore,
the dialogue where Lambrini is accusing Gikas and Eleni of the murder of her son-
in-law is barely heard. The impression that remains is of two figures reduced to the
minimum among the debris. The humans lose their dominance over the environment.
They are two small subjects among the huge rocks that will devour them both.

Often the long take deviates from the evolution of the story in the form of small
interludes. After the scene between Lambrini and the rural guard, the old woman is
framed in a long shot from a lower angle, at a distance while she is walking aimlessly
outside her house. What the camera exposes is an old woman dressed in mourning
black carrying an open umbrella. This shot is a cornerstone for the Angelopoulian

47
mise-en-scene. It introduces a powerful image that is to reappear in almost every
Angelopoulos’ films: a human being holding an umbrella.

This image has often been attributed as a direct allusion to Magritte, and maybe this
is indeed what the director superimposes on the image when he frames the old
woman. Yet again, this is not a symbol but more of a direct image. The old woman
does nothing. She walks back and forth and stares directly into the lens of the
camera. That woman is no longer Lambrini. She is an old woman of this mountain
village in Epirus, captured by the lens of the camera.

If we were to use Deleuze’s term this is another optical image. 36 The optical image
contains a level of autonomy which breaks up an order based on a cause and effect.
In an action-based narrative, the characters act and react. Their movement regulates
the narrative. The optical image is pure seeing. The characters move but their
movement brings to the foreground images that the characters observe. Deleuze
gives as an example the image of a child in neo-realist films:

The role of the child in neo-realism has been pointed out…this is

because, in the adult world, the child is affected by a certain motor
helplessness, but one that makes him all the more capable of seeing and
hearing. 37

The two lovers in Reconstruction are actually reduced to that level of helplessness.
Their wandering in the streets of Ioannina reveals their angst when things seem to be
catching up with them. The camera adopts the point of view of the characters.
Nevertheless, the adoption of the characters’ point of view does not classify the shots
as purely subjective shots of the characters. In the majority of the shots the characters
are included in the frame in a manner reminiscent of Antonioni’s Chronicle of A
Love (1950). What at first seems to be a point-of-view shot turns out to include the
character with his/her entrance into the frame.

48
In Reconstruction the lovers are reduced to the mere act of seeing. They are unable to
act. The central square where Gikas starts wandering is full of soldiers. During his
stranded walk, men in uniforms dominate the space. The camera also frames faces of
actual people who are interwoven into the fiction just by chance. The grainy image in
the night sequence of Ioannina intensifies the sense of documentation. In a sense they
deliver what André Bazin argues with respect to the images of Vittorio De Sica in the
forties. Shots filmed on location although calculated beforehand, deliver a sense of
realism that is also subordinated to the element of chance. 38

It is mostly through the French New Wave that chance appeared as a prolific element
in film as it made its way through the streets of Paris. Being in the streets would
either give a perfect opportunity for free play as in Godard’s Bande à Part (1964) or
it would render a sense of a maze whose noise would fill the main character with
terror, as in Louis Malle’s Le Feu Follet (1963). Yet in the French New Wave all the
jump cuts and the hand-held camera movements - in short all the experimentations
with form - fit perfectly with the urban environment. The discord of the plot fits
perfectly with the fractured time of a European Metropolis.

In Reconstruction, the hand-held camera, the rough cuts, the superimposed sounds of
the city, the underexposed images provide a nocturnal fresco of noise reminiscent of
the French New Wave. Yet, far from being that of a European metropolis, it
represents the noise of Ioannina. It is a noise that shouts its poverty, its surrender to
the military and the angst from the imposed modernisation on agricultural societies.
The two lovers encounter a cityscape outside the village, but it is also a world of
repression. The city cannot provide redemption.

Almost all the faces that are captured by the lens of the camera are gloomy, like the
weather that surrounds the city. Gikas’ movement in the streets is juxtaposed with a
long take of stasis back at the hotel, where Eleni creeps out the window to listen to a
mourning song which is heard offscreen. The camera follows her pace until she is
immobilised by the window and then it continues panning at a slow pace revealing
the people who are gathered outside around a fire singing. This shot works as an

49
interlude with Gikas’ wandering at night. It could just as well be the remains of the
στάσιμο (stasimo) of the ancient Greek tragedies. The stasimo was the song or ode
sung by the chorus in-between episodes in order to comment on the developing
action. 39 The word στάσιμο comes from the word stasis which means “standing still”.
While performing the song, the chorus stood still. In the film the polyphonic song
performed by the standing men concentrates all the dramatic tension that the
characters are not carrying forward through dialogue. It delivers the dramatic
tensions that are absent from the rest of the film. It voices death.

The use of Myth

Andrew Horton claims that Angelopoulos borrows a schema from the myth of
Atreides. 40 In the ancient fable, the father, Agamemnon, returns to Mycenae after the
end of the Trojan War only to be brutally murdered by his wife Clytemnestra and her
lover Aigisthos who then becomes the king. Agamemnon’s son Orestes kills them
both at a later stage in the myth.

Angelopoulos gave an interview in 1988 to the French documentarist Chris Marker

as part of The Legacy of the Owl, Marker’s documentary TV series about ancient and
modern Greece. In it, he claims that it was only retrospectively that he realised the
motif of the Atreidian circle in the story of the return and the murder. Still, the
relationship between the ancient fable and the story of Reconstruction is not totally
arbitrary. The fact that Angelopoulos claims not to have consciously made the
connection at the time of shooting only lends substance to the view that the myth
functions in terms of a structure. However, even if the director did not use the myth
consciously, he situates the action near the ruins of ancient Tymphea so that the link
with the ancient past is established. Still, Angelopoulos does not use the myth as a
structure for a reductive formalism. Angelopoulos does not cancel out history, an
observation we shall consider more closely in his next three films which form the
Trilogy of History.

50
In Reconstruction, Eleni kills her husband, and in the end she is punished. The
village is a patriarchal society. The voiceover at the beginning of the film locates it
next to the ancient Tymphea. The myth is now played out as if on top of the ruins of
antiquity. Angelopoulos stages a tragedy but this is not a reference to a glorious past.
The current inhabitants of the village are not part of a mythical circle. They are
subjected to history and they are victims of economic depression.

The Atreidian circle is attributed to villagers in the middle of the 20th century. This
automatic democratisation of symbols, far from pointing to an ancient shadow cast
on modernity, uses the Atreidian motif as a break from rather than a link with the
past. The link could be the land that appears as the same setting playing host to the
acts of men through the centuries. Yet this setting is the same only in terms of
geographical orientation.

Angelopoulos captures a moment in time. Eleni is a repressed woman in a patriarchal

society. Her elevation to the state of a rebel is seen as a process caused by historical
facts - the subordination of woman to man in an agricultural society, the economic
depression. We might say that Eleni reaches individuation by the time she attempts
to strangle the inquisitor. It is then that she becomes a ruler of her own
consciousness. But even this is not given: it is implied, as is almost everything in the
film. Almost nothing is provided through dialogue.

Eleni is not a fixed character throughout the film. In the beginning she blames Gikas,
but then she is awakened. Her punishment is not because she committed hubris,
because she went too far: we see this through the reconstructions that function with
the perspective of identifying guilt with one individual person. For that reason they
are hollow. They belong to the regime of identitarian thought. As John Holloway
points out:

Power is exercised over people through their effective identification…

Law too is based on identity: the person subjected to legal process is
identified, separated from all the others who might be considered as co-

51
 responsible in some way. The identification is expressed very
physically: in the treatment of a person as an identified individual, in
the physical enclosure in a prison or a cell, possibly in execution, that
supreme act of identification which says ‘you are and have been and
shall not become’. Is-ness, identity the denial of becoming is death. 41

Eleni kills her husband and simultaneously destroys her identity as a wife. Under the
humiliating and subjugating reconstructions enforced by the police, Eleni changes
into an agent of negation. She denies the oppression enforced upon her by the police
and throws the rope at the feet of the inquisitor. Gikas, the lover, on the other hand is
subordinated to the law: he bows his head and allows Eleni to take the blame.

This shift in the characters’ consciousness also triggers a shift in the narrative of the
film. Gikas’ presence is gradually reduced after the second half of the film and Eleni
becomes the main figure. Yet in the film there is no space for becoming, for
evolution. The murder has taken place from the start of the film. The libidinal force it
unleashes cannot be integrated into the social flow. Eleni destroys her identity as a
wife but her act means nothing to the community. The rest of the women try to lynch
her. Eleni develops consciousness, but her reaction is that of a single individual who
remains unable to change the course of events apart from taking her own destiny into
her hands. That she certainly does when she unleashes her rage towards the
inquisitor.

In the middle of all this lies the investigation of the journalists. It cannot provide the
clues concerning the murder case which the journalists are searching for. On the
other hand, what it does do is document the voices of the villagers and inform the
viewer of their hopes to emigrate in search of a better future. As Vassilis Rafailides
points out, the way the villagers talk about Germany in particular is as if it were the
Promised Land. 42 In fact, none of them knows anything about Germany, nor what to
expect if and when they ever get there. The sequence with the documented voices has
connotations of tragic irony, since the modern viewer knows of the misery that
usually accompanies emigration.

52
Angelopoulos uses the documented voices of actual villagers. The voice-over
commentaries become autonomous in relation to the development of the plot. The
viewer realises that these are recorded voices of actual people and not of actors
reading a script. They are documents of a specific historical moment that moves
beyond the realm of fiction. All the villagers in the film are the actual villagers of
Tymphea. 43 The policemen are the actual policemen of the region, who investigated
the real incident of the murder. The only professional actor in the film is the rural
guard: even Eleni is not played by an actress. The women of the village function as
an ancient chorus who are united only at the end of the film in a brilliant 360°
panning shot, coming together in order to lynch Eleni as an act of erasing the
reminder of their submission. They are unable to accept her rebellion because it is
exactly what signifies their submission. 44

With Reconstruction, Angelopoulos presents a film with a critical outlook. He does

not adopt the point of view of the diegetic characters. He uses the same people who
had been involved in the real incident, and goes forth with his own reconstruction
that runs parallel to the other two: the reconstruction staged by the police and that of
the journalists. The police reconstruction is useless in its attempt to identify the killer
among the two lovers. The journalists, in their turn, deal with the case as just another
part of the newsreel. Like the policemen, they are outsiders, indifferent to the
everyday life of the villagers. The ruthless visual recordings of Eleni’s children in
close up turn their faces into commodities for the promotion of a false image, that of
the ephemeral shock. The audio interviews, although useless in terms of the murder
case, reveal the frustrated nature of people abandoned in a small village.

The director breaks through the two investigations to make his own inquiry. 45 The
crime seems to be embedded in this sterile society and the director is there to inquire,
but he does not offer any solutions. The role of the filmmaker cannot be but that of
the reconstruction. What effect can this film have on the history of the village? What
will the filmmaker do for the destiny of Eleni? Angelopoulos questions the essence
of filmmaking. The filmmaker is a stranger to this land himself.

53
The film ends with the camera left immobile outside the door of the house where the
crime took place. The land is dying: the crime is played over and over again in
endless reconstructions.

1
See Γιάννης Σολδάτος, Ιστορία του Ελληνικού Κινηματογράφου: Τόμος Β’ (1967-1990), Αιγόκερως,
Αθήνα, 1999, p. 279.
2
See Γιάννης Σολδάτος, Ιστορία του Ελληνικού Κινηματογράφου: Τόμος Β’ (1967-1990), Αιγόκερως,
Αθήνα, 1999, pp 59-62. See also the history of the Thessaloniki Film Festival in
[Link]
3
The figures are taken from Χρυσάνθη Σωτηροπούλου, Ελληνική Κινηματογραφία 1965 – 1975:
Θεσμικό Πλαίσιο – Οικονομική Κατάσταση, Εκδόσεις Θεμέλιο, Αθήνα, 1989, pp. 79-83.
4
See Χρυσάνθη Σωτηροπούλου, Ελληνική Κινηματογραφία 1965 – 1975: Θεσμικό Πλαίσιο –
Οικονομική Κατάσταση, Εκδόσεις Θεμέλιο, Αθήνα, 1989, pp 76-88.
5
Χρυσάνθη Σωτηροπούλου, Ibid. p 93.
6
See the history of the Thessaloniki Film Festival in
[Link]
7
See Γιάννης Σολδάτος, Ιστορία του Ελληνικού Κινηματογράφου: Τόμος Β’ (1967-1990), ibid, p. 59.
8
See the interview with Nikos Koundouros by Giorgos Veltsos which is included in the DVD release
of The Ogre in the daily newspaper Κυριακάτικη Ελευθεροτυπία (exclusive distributor: New Star).
9
In reality, the first feature film of the New Greek Cinema was Kierion by Dimos Theos in 1969,
where Angelopoulos features as an actor along with many directors of the forthcoming wave.
However, since Kierion was not screened in Greece until 1975 due to censorship, Reconstruction is
considered to be the first feature of the new wave. Another feature that carries the aura of the Modern
and does in fact predate both the above mentioned films is the Shepherds (1967) by Niko Papatakis.
Still, like Kierion the film was screened in Greece only after the fall of the junta. It should also be
noted that although the film was actually shot in Greece, it was in fact a French production by a Greek
director who lived in France.
For an extended history of the Thessaloniki Film Festival see the archives link in the Thessaloniki
Film Festival web page. [Link]
See also: Γιάννης Σολδάτος, Ιστορία του Ελληνικού Κινηματογράφου: Β’ τόμος (1967-1990),
Αιγόκερως, Αθήνα, 1999.
10
Βασίλης Ραφαηλίδης, ‘Οι Προϋποθέσεις για την Ανάπτυξη του Νέου Ελληνικού Κινηματογράφου
στην Ελλάδα’ in Γιάννης Σολδάτος, Ιστορία του Ελληνικού Κινηματογράφου: Τόμος Β’ (1967-1990) ,
ibid, pp. 60-61.
11
See Γιάννης Σολδάτος, Ιστορία του Ελληνικού Κινηματογράφου: Τόμος Β’ (1967-1990), ibid, p. 61.
12
In the late ‘50s critics of the Cahiers saw the director as being solely responsible for the aesthetics
of a film. Much earlier, in 1948, Alexander Astruc paved the way with his essay Birth of a New
Avant-Garde: the Camera-Pen, where he defined the function of the director as an individual creator
similar to the novelist or the painter. For a brief discussion of authorship see Robert Stam, Film
Theory – An Introduction, Blackwell Publishers, Malden Massachusetts,2000, pp. 83-88. For a more
detailed discussion that includes individual essays from the pages of the Cahiers du Cinema see
Theories of Authorship: a reader, ed. John Caughie, Routledge & Kegan Paul in association with the
British Film Institute, London, 1981.

54
13
Θόδωρος Αγγελόπουλος, 10 ¾: Σενάρια – ΠρώτοςΤόμος, Αιγόκερως, Αθήνα, 1997, trns. E.M., p.
27.
14
War and adventure films like The Guns of Navarone (1961) and The Executioner (1970) with
George Peppard use the bright sunlight and blue of the Aegean as a backdrop to their action-based
plots. Most of the films are shot exclusively in the summer. The first Hollywood production in
Greece, The Boy and the Dolphin (1957) followed by the above-mentioned and by Alexis Zorbas
(1964) were the most popular Hollywood productions in Greece for the period and they all adhere to
the same formula. The films of Jules Dassen, Never on Sunday (1960) and Top Kapi (1964), although
they claim artistic value nevertheless portray a country with bright undertones and sunny landscapes.
15
Roland Barthes, Mythologies, Vintage, London, 1993, trns. Annette Lavers, pp. 151 – 152.
16
Sergio Arecco, Θόδωρος Αγγελόπουλος, Ηράκλειτος, Αθήνα, 1985, p. 38.
17
Sergio Arecco, ibid. p. 36.
18
Theo Angelopoulos, interview with the author, unpublished, June 2005. See also interview with
Konstantinos Themelis in Κωνσταντίνος Θέμελης, Θόδωρος Αγγελόπουλος: Το παρελθόν ως Φόρμα,
Το Μέλλον ως Ιστορία, Ύψιλον/βιβλία, Αθήνα, 1998, p.142.
19
Theo Angelopoulos, interview with the author, unpublished, June 2005.
20
Theo Angelopoulos οn interview with Konstantinos Themelis in Κωνσταντίνος Θέμελης, Θόδωρος
Αγγελόπουλος: Το παρελθόν ως Φόρμα, Το Μέλλον ως Ιστορία, Ύψιλον/βιβλία, Αθήνα, 1998, p.142.
21
As noted by Theo Angelopoulos in Sergio Arecco, Θόδωρος Αγγελόπουλος, ibid, p. 34.
22
Theo Angelopoulos interview with Konstantinos Themelis in Κωνσταντίνος Θέμελης, Θόδωρος
Αγγελόπουλος: Το παρελθόν ως Φόρμα, Το Μέλλον ως Ιστορία,ibid., p. 146
23
Ibid., p. 146.
24
Ibid, p.147.
25
Ibid, p. 147.
26
Ibid. p. 148.
27
Angelopoulos remarks that watching films in the Cinemateque while he was in Paris equaled the
experience he would get by attending a film academy. See interview given to the head of Public
Relations for Merchant Ivory in the U.S.A with the title ‘Οι εικόνες Γεννιούνται στα ταξίδια’ in
Θόδωρος Αγγελόπουλος, ed. Ειρήνη Στάθη, Φεστιβάλ Κινηματογράφου Θεσσαλονίκης - Εκδόσεις
Καστανιώτη, Αθήνα, 2000, p. 191.
28
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, Vintage Books, London, (1980)
2000. pp. 113-114.
29
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2- The Time Image The Athlone Press, London 1989, p 2.
30
Gilles Deleuze, ibid., p. 16-17.
31
Fredric Jameson, ‘Theo Angelopoulos: The Past as History the Future as Form’ in The Last
Modernist: The Films of Theo Angelopoulos, ed. Andrew Horton, Flick Books, Trowbridge, 1997, p
84-85.
32
Γιάννης Μπακογιαννόπουλος, ‘Το Πρόσωπο της Επιστροφής’ in Θόδωρος Αγγελόπουλος, ed.
Ειρήνη Στάθη, Φεστιβάλ Κινηματογράφου Θεσσαλονίκης - Εκδόσεις Καστανιώτη, Αθήνα, 2000, pp.
214 - 215
33
See Kaja Silverman, ‘From The Subject of Semiotics [On Suture]’ in Film Theory and Criticism ed.
by Leo Braudy Marshall Cohen, Oxford University Press, 1999 pp. 137-140.
34
See Kaja Silverman, ibid, pp.138-139.
8
Edward R. Branigan, Point of View in the Cinema, Mouton Publishers, 1984, p 12.
35
Slavoj Žižek, The Fright of Real Tears-Krzysztof Kieślowski- Between Theory and Post-Theory,
BFI, 2001, pp. 34-36.
36
Gilles Deleuze Cinema 2- The Time Image The Athlone Press, London 1989, pp 2 – 4.
37
Ibid, p. 3.
38
Andre Bazin, ‘De Sica: Metteur-en-scene’ in Film Theory and Criticism ed by Leo Braudy Marshall
Cohen, Oxford University Press 1999 pp. 203 – 211.
39
Κώστας Γεωργουσόπουλος από την εισαγωγή του στη Δραματική Ποίηση, Οργανισμός Εκδόσεων
διδακτικών Βιβλίων, Αθήνα, 1985, pp 20 - 21
40
See also Andrew Horton, The Films of Theo Angelopoulos-a Cinema of Contemplation, Princeton
University Press, Princeton New Jersey, 1997, p. 45.
41
John Holloway, Change The World Without Taking Power: The Meaning of Revolution Today,
Pluto Press, London 2002, pp. 71 – 72.

55
42
See Βασίλης Ραφαηλίδης, ‘Αναπαράσταση’ in Ελληνικός Κινηματογράφος - Κριτική 1965-1995,
Αιγόκερως,1995 p.24
43
Γιάννης Μπακογιαννόπουλος, ‘Το Πρόσωπο της Επιστροφής’ in Θόδωρος Αγγελόπουλος, ed.
Ειρήνη Στάθη, ibid p 209
44
See Angelopoulos’ comments in Sergio Arecco, Θόδωρος Αγγελόπουλος, Ηράκλειτος, Αθήνα,
1985, p. 34.
45
This is what the director himself claims on interview with the author, June 2005, unpublished. This
is also noted by Sergio Arreco in Sergio Arecco, Θόδωρος Αγγελόπουλος, Ηράκλειτος, Αθήνα, 1985,
p. 37.

56
 DAYS OF ’36 / ΜΕΡΕΣ ΤΟΥ ’36

It is the period before the national elections of 1936. In a square full of workers a
trade unionist is shot. A person by the name of Sofianos, a former police
collaborator, is arrested. While in captivity he takes his lawyer hostage when the
latter visits him in his cell and demands to be released immediately. The hostage is a
rightwing MP. Soon the whole political world is involved. A number of state
representatives arrive at the prison where Sofianos is being held and start
negotiations. Almost immediately the political prisoners in the prison start a riot.
Three prisoners manage to climb over the prison wall but the riot is brought under
control and the escapees are captured. The government desperately seeks a
resolution. It is only in power thanks to a fragile arrangement between the rightwing
and the liberal centre. They are aware that the death of the lawyer would lead to the
loss of rightwing support. On the other hand, if the prisoner were to be released, the
central coalition would withdraw their vote from the government. At the end of the
film, Sofianos is assassinated and the three political prisoners who had escaped
during the riots are executed, thus signaling the establishment of the military
dictatorship of Ioannis Metaxas.

Released in 1972, The Days of ‛36 is the first part of what Angelopoulos calls The
Trilogy of History. In a film produced by Giorgos Papalios, the director succeeds in
creating a political allegory for the existing junta. As we have already seen, Greece
was under the rule of a military coup known as the junta of the colonels from 1967
until 1974. The coup was organised against a backdrop of strong political turmoil. In
1965 Georgios Papandreou and his party Ένωσις Κέντρου (Centrist Union) fell from
power as a result of a number of ministers and MPs defecting to the Right. The
country then witnessed a number of successive governments that failed to establish
autonomy and thus consecutively resigned. At the same time there were fears that a
possible coup might be organised by the King of Greece, Konstantinos, and a group
of MPs belonging to the rightwing E.Ρ.Ε. (Greek Radical Union). The United States,

57
whose involvement in Greek internal affairs had been intense since the start of the
Civil War in 1946, were in favour of a liberal democratic regime that would act in
their favour but they were also prepared to accept a coup by the Palace.

After 1965 there was a strong number of public demonstrations demanding the
resignation of the consecutive governments that came after Papandreou, in order for
the country to hold elections from which Papandreou would almost certainly emerge
as a victor. Many demonstrations led to major clashes with the police. During the
same period the communists faced new prosecutions. Their party had been illegal
since the start of the Civil War in 1946 although they did manage to have a shadowy
representation through the party of E.Δ.Α. (Greek Democratic Left) which was
founded in the late fifties. On the 21st of April 1967 a group of colonels under the
leadership of Georgios Papadopoulos seized power with the pretence of preventing a
communist revolution. Apparently the coup had not been foreseen by any Greek
political agent or the King, all of whom were unaware of the Papadopoulos fraction.
The U.S.A authorities also claimed not to have known of the existence of the group.
Nevertheless after a short period they recognised and collaborated with the new
regime. According to many journalists and historians like Alexis Papahelas and
Vassilis Rafailides, the coup was aided and supported by C.I.A. agents operating in
Greece. 1

The new regime launched harsher prosecutions of the Left. Many leftwing supporters
were imprisoned and others were sent into exile to rocky islands in the Aegean or
sent abroad as “unwanted”. The intelligentsia in Greece chose to remain silent as a
way of protesting against the junta. 2 Many others fled abroad, mainly to France,
where they became engaged in anti-junta activities. Among them was the actress
Melina Mercouri and the author Vassilis Vassilikos, whose book Z, about the 1963
assassination of the leftwing MP Grigoris Lambrakis by members of a fascist
fraction collaborating with the police, was adapted for the screen by another Greek
emmigrant, Costas Gavras. The regime fostered a policy of pre-censorship. 3 Under
slogans such as Nation, Religion, Family, and The Patient (i.e. Greece) Requires
Surgical Treatment, the junta censored any public work that hinted at communist

58
ideas. The attempt to use the media in order to support the new regime in addition to
the public rituals organised by the military created an image which was both comic
and tragic and showed that the colonels were absolutely a local product, as suggested
by Vassilikos in Chris Marker’s documentary The Legacy of the Owl. In 1972
however, media censorship became more lenient. The previous year the regime had
reinstated parliament as part of the transition policy that would lead to the gradual
withdrawal of the military from the political foreground. 4 The function of the
parliament was however merely iconic and the regime would probably not have
collapsed had it not been for the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974. Nevertheless,
this policy made it possible for the filmmakers of N.E.K (New Greek Cinema) to
deal with issues that would otherwise have been subjected to censorship.

For his second film, Angelopoulos cooperated with producer Giorgos Papalios who
had seen Reconstruction and was willing to produce his next film. It is worth noting
that it was the producer who first approached the director. 5 Angelopoulos worked on
the script with Petros Markaris, Thanassis Valtinos and Stratis Karras - the last two
had also worked on Reconstruction. As in the previous film, Angelopoulos based his
story on a true event. On the eve of the dictatorship of General Metaxas, a prisoner
took his lawyer hostage, an event that caused major turmoil in the political world of
the period. In order for the film to be approved it was necessary for the script to pass
the pre-censorship committee. Angelopoulos notes that it was due to the help of a
former friend of his from law school who had once belonged to the Left and was
currently working with the junta that the script was approved. 6 Another reason
though was that the colonels did not want to be associated with the dictatorship of
Metaxas.

Angelopoulos moves from the cloudy skies of the north and sets the action of the
film in a prison in the western part of Crete. The interior shots were filmed in
Athens. Angelopoulos continued his collaboration with Giorgos Arvanitis on
cinematography and Mikes Karapiperis on set design. Days of ’36 is an exceptional
film in the director’s filmography since it is the only work that is shot in bright
sunlight; the predominant colours are brown and yellow. Angelopoulos’ first attempt

59
with colour recreates the oeuvre of the thirties using the predominant architectural
yellow. Far from being a mere reality trope, the choice of yellow inscribes a sense of
desolation and dryness in the image. Furthermore the days before the fall of
democracy represent a dive into the past that introduces the sequence shot as a
predominant narrative tool.

Days of ’36 takes us back to the last days before the fall of the democratic regime
and the rise of the dictatorship of General Metaxas that lasted until the Nazi invasion
in 1941. The film ends chronologically with the establishment of the dictatorship, an
act which is implied through the execution of the prison fugitives. Although based on
an actual event -the hostage-taking of a parliamentary member - the film does not
attempt to dramatise any of the major historical events of the era. The focus is shifted
instead to the microcosm of the prison. The social upheavals and the demonstrations
of 1935 are reduced to the documented stills in the opening credits. The successive
change of governments before the fall of the democracy along with any attempt to
reconstruct historical documents of the fall are not dealt with in the film. The
historical political figures who played major parts at the time are reduced to models
or caricatures of power and authority. Franco Cordelli writes about the film:

The core of the film is to be located in the prologue. Everything has

already been said before the opening credits, as in a Greek tragedy.
Everything has already occurred. The rest is nothing but the
consequences of the unexplained. ‘The rest’ though is the film. The
essence of the film is the film itself. 7

Cordelli here touches upon a crucial issue: the subject matter of the film is
inseparable from its form. The event of the introduction, which was a real historical
event, is the assassination of the unionist just as he is about to deliver a speech in the
middle of a factory square full of workers. As he walks onto the podium together
with one of the workers, a gunshot comes from off-screen. The spokesman falls dead
and the crowd scatters. The camera keeps recording until the space of the square is
emptied of every worker. The bullet preconditions the future of the land, suggesting

60
that yet again it might host a modern tragedy but now it is the acts of human beings
which will define its course. It is not clear if Cordelli has in mind a definition of
tragedy as the struggle of reason against a preconditioned fate. Yet what we have in
the film is not a circular fatalism because of the absence of major historical personae
and the reduction of social upheavals to the stills of the opening credits, the film
cannot be said to show the return of a cyclical structure that is embedded in
humanity, nor does it suggest an ahistorical power game between masters and
servants. It is rather, according to Sergio Arreco, an allegory that retains its dialectic
with the present. 8 The assassination of the spokesman signifies the death of dialogue.
The end of dialogue through violence is the end of democracy. The film is making
visible what cannot be said. Angelopoulos conveys the state of censorship he was
living and working under at the time in the form of the film. The violence of the first
sequence was present in real life at the time of the film’s production. Angelopoulos
often notes that his decision to stay in Greece during the period of the junta was
reinforced by a beating he received from a police officer during a demonstration he
happened to encounter. 9 Angelopoulos places the action in the thirties but the film is
a comment on the contemporary junta.

Framing the unsaid

The film proceeds in a linear temporal pattern. After the assassination comes the
arrest of the suspect, Sofianos. His lawyer is brought to his cell in the prison where
he is being held. Sofianos takes him hostage and the rest of the film deals with the
attempts to find a resolution until the final execution. The chronological linearity of
the story however does not coincide with a linear narrative of cause and effect. In
Reconstruction the time transitions between sequences were done with a simple cut
so that it was impossible for the audience to immediately comprehend the time
lapses. The film established a dialectical system between thematic episodes where
each episode stood for a different point in time. In Days of ’36, although the narrative
does not move back and forth in time, each sequence transfers the narrative to a
different locale whose relevance with what came before or what comes next is

61
likewise not directly shown through a system of cause and effect. The viewer has to
constantly question the logic of the transitions from one space to the next, while the
images unfold, in order to make sense of them. Furthermore, the narrative places a
stronger emphasis on the relationship between two single shots rather than complete
thematic episodes.

The fourth sequence, which comes after the opening credits, consists of two shots. In
the first the camera tracks slowly into the bedroom of what seems to be an upper-
class residency. A man is sleeping. A maid brings him the telephone. The man is a
lawyer and rightwing MP called Kriezis but his identity is not revealed until the
middle of the fifth sequence where he is brought to Sofianos’ cell. The second
sequence is one long crane shot. Two men are waiting at the sides of a dirt road in
the middle of a forest. It is only at the end of the sequence shot that the audience
becomes aware of what is taking place. It is the arrest of the man who we will later
recognize as Sofianos. As the narrative progresses, the spectators’ anticipation
increases. What seems to be the unfolding of a crime story becomes an inquiry into
the silences that mask a backstage game of power. The eleventh sequence shows
Kriezis’ mother visiting the office of the head of the Conservative Party, once her
son has been taken hostage by Sofianos. Kriezis’ mother is related to the head of the
Conservatives but that is as much as is revealed. The two of them are probably going
to analyze the political implications of Kriezis’ captivity in full detail. However, the
viewer is deprived of the power to know. The sequence ends with the two of them
singing an old romantic song. The next sequence takes place in the prison.

The narrative skeleton is built on the juxtaposition of sequences. The sequence as

defined by Jean Mitry is “the summation of images that refer to the same space and
the same decorum, whatever the changes are in the optical field – meaning the
change of shots – at the time of the creation of that summation.” 10 Different spaces
can be related through movement and be thus part of the summation. As Eirini Stathi
points out:

62
 The sequence is a series of events (acts) that when put together create
the spatio-temporal frame of an event or a behavior, thus underlining
the bond that keeps these events together as well as the effect of this
bond, the compact summation. 11

As David Bordwell remarks, the sequence in Days of ’36 is yet to be identified with
one single long take as a dominant device as in The Travelling Players. 12 Yet even
when it is not a single take the number of shots in each sequence is limited to the
minimum. Four sequences stand out in the film, consisting of only one or two takes.
These are the sequence of the arrest, the inauguration of the Olympic stadium, the
attempted escape of the political prisoners and the assassination of Sofianos. It is
evident that all the sequences in the film maintain a spatial uniformity. While a cut
into a shot of different spatiotemporal situation might be treated as part of the same
sequence, since it is directly related to the evolving action, in the above shots the cut
would either signify the start of another sequence or belong to the same spatial
confines. It is as if Angelopoulos were materializing a realist aesthetic where the
long duration of the take, the absence of excessive editing, the use of natural settings
and the absence of non-diegetic soundtrack lead to an objective inscription of reality
through imitation. The absence of the cut within the confines of the same sequence
reflects André Bazin’s dictum of an image that renders the reconstruction of a perfect
illusion of the outside world in sound, colour and relief. 13

As early as the twenties, film theory had been divided into the mimetic
representational/expressive dichotomy. In the 1930s, Rudolf Arnheim rejected the
idea of the photographic representation of outside reality, in other words mimesis as a
form of art. Arnheim argued that film had to show things in ways exclusive to the
medium. Artificial lighting, lack of depth, editing, slow or fast motion among other
tropes were elements that provided film with its essence; film not as a field of
representation but film as artistic expressiveness. 14 Ten years earlier, Bela Bálázs
had stressed the importance of montage as the essential element of film against a
theatrical arrangement of the mise en scène. 15 The opposite line was taken by
theorists like André Bazin who in the aftermath of the Second World War argued

63
against an excessive fragmentation of reality from the director who through the use
of montage leads the audience to preconditioned reactions, thus violating his/her
sense of freedom to make sense of the image. 16 In contrast he claimed that “shooting
in depth brings the film closer to reality” and “implies consequently, both a more
active mental attitude on the part of the spectator and a more positive contribution on
his part to the action in progress…it is from his [the spectator’s] attention and his
will that the meaning of the image in part derives.” 17

Throughout the sixties and the rise of modern cinema the debate took on a new
dimension with directors like Jean-Luc Godard who combined montage with the
aesthetic realism of the long take. Angelopoulos who emerges from the aftermath of
the sixties and uses the long take as a major narrative tool would automatically be
placed in the realist camp. Yet what we see in Days of ’36 is that the long take
functions on a second level, under a montage principle. I will argue that there is a
strong affinity between Eisenstein’s montage and the aesthetic of the long take.
Angelopoulos materializes a realist aesthetic that renders an extended visual field.
The emphasis here lies on the recording apparatus and the space of the mise en
scène. A completed action is often carried out without a single cut. Yet on a second
level the film conveys a staging of the mise en scène that follows a formalist
principle begun in the sixties through the reinvention of a montage aesthetic by film
directors like Jean-Luc Godard or Jean-Marie Straub and Danièlle Huillet. This
staging renders a semiotic handling of the image where the elements on the screen
become carriers of meaning rather than functioning as mere décor for the realistic
representation of the era in which the action is set.

When two sequences collide

In the sixth and seventh sequences, namely the inauguration of the Olympic stadium
and the escape of the Leftists, we have the description of two disparate actions. Both
are shot on location. Both sequences use extreme long shots and both takes involve

64
crowds. The open space in the first sequence is followed by the confined space of the
prison yard in the second, while the shots match perfectly in terms of light and
colour. We could argue that these two sequences are on one level complete, in that
they describe two disparate events in their entirety. There is no apparent connection
in terms of plot evolution. The narrative drive of the first is to show that the minister
is informed about Kriezis having been taken hostage, yet this is not explicitly stated.
Furthermore we are not given any clues as to whether the action in the second
sequence is related to the story involving Kriezis’ captivity.

The first sequence shows the state representatives in a carnivalesque manner. We see
them on top of a stage while a group of young athletes is standing in line formation
in front of the stage. The inaugurating ritual, in itself an allusion and a parody of the
junta and its ancestors’ worship rituals, is filmed in long takes. The time inscribed in
the image through the duration of the shots provides the sequence with a sense of
autonomy. Angelopoulos cuts just once within the sequence, shifting the point of
view from ground level to a panoramic circular crane shot. The first shot is taken
from where the athletes are standing while the second is taken from behind the stage.
We as viewers are left witnessing the ritual which ends with the minister entering a
limousine which is then driven in circles around the standing ensemble of youths.
But when another car approaches and the minister is presumably informed about
Kriezis’ captivity, the camera does not go near the cars in order to record the
discussions. It is as if the camera witnesses from a distance and is unable to offer
more clarity. In the next episode of the attempted escape the camera maintains the
same distance from the crowd in the prison yard. It does not trespass among the
prisoners.

Although the sequences both carry two completed actions that happen in different
spatiotemporal confines their place in the narrative is neither accidental nor does it
merely convey two actions that happen either simultaneously or in chronological
succession. The juxtaposition of the two sequences moves the narrative from the
sphere of the action to the sphere of the concept. I will claim that the sequences in
fact convey a feeling of montage in retrospect. This results from the juxtaposition of

65
two crowds who belong in different ideological spaces. It is their position as thesis–
antithesis that represents a social and political collision and creates a third meaning.
The Left is imprisoned and the state advances into progress through violence and
suppression. As the director himself notes, history is thus embedded in the form of
the film. 18 A crane shot from the first sequence is contrasted with the ground level
sequence shot in the prison yard. The hierarchy of the social order is signified
through the perspective of the camera lens but also through the arrangement of the
mise en scène. The organized youth stand immobile in front of a stage where the
minister is reciting a manuscript from the ‘Epinikeia’ of Pindaros. Behind him are
representatives of the church. The sequence implies the affinity the authorities have
with whatever is ancient. The regime supports a direct link between modern and
Ancient Greece where the former is seen as the carrier of the heritage of antiquity.
The circular route of the minister’s car becomes a spectacle to raise the prestige of
the government. The youth stand immobile and speechless, unable to understand
their role in the staging of the act. They act in terms of a passive chorus and their
stillness contrasts with the riot in the prison. There, in contrast, a group of political
prisoners as bearers of consciousness try to escape but their attempt is thwarted. The
camera in turn observes the staging of two acts from a certain distance rather than
being invited to come closer to the field of action. It is an effect that works against an
emotional reading of the image and a psychological investment of events, but also
works towards an effect of self-censorship that the director imposes on the form of
the film. We never hear what is actually said to the minister.

The prison yard sequence is staged under the same principle. We as viewers see a
man at a distance walking from the right of the frame to the centre, where he meets a
fellow prisoner and whispers something in his ear. He passes it on to the rest of the
prisoners as the camera tracks to the left. Again, we never hear what is said. We are
deprived of the authority to know when the escape was planned for, who organized it
or what is said.

According to Sergei Eisenstein’s theory of montage, two images can be juxtaposed in

order to stimulate a particular reaction in the spectator’s psyche. 19 The images are

66
not connected through a cause and effect system. Their juxtaposition functions
against the dramatisation of an event in a space-time continuum but rather moves
towards fragmentation of the action. The images are placed in direct conflict to each
other in order to appeal either to the senses or the intellect of the audience. In
Eisenstein’s words, “montage is not an idea composed of successive shots stuck
together but an idea that DERIVES from the collision between two shots that are
independent of one another…As in Japanese hieroglyphics in which two independent
ideographic characters (‘shots’) are juxtaposed and explode into a concept.” 20 Two
images from different spatio-temporal situations can be set against each other and
their confrontation will give rise to a concept in the mind of the viewer. Eisenstein
continues:

In our film ‘October’ we inserted images of harps and balalaikas in

between the scene of the Mensheviks’ speech. These harps were not
harps; they were symbolic representations of the opportunistic speeches
of the Mensheviks during the second convention of the Soviet in
1917…By placing side by side a Menshevik and a harp, a Menshevik
and a balalaika we broaden the limits of the parallel montage, we open a
new space: The montage moves from the sphere of the action to the
sphere of the concept. 21

Instead of juxtaposing images (shots) within the sequence, Angelopoulos builds up

autonomous sequences that are in direct conflict with each other. Each sequence
retains spatial uniformity and a completed action. The fact that they are placed one
after the other creates a third meaning as demonstrated with the sixth and seventh
sequences - the collision between the Conservative powers and the Left. Yet the
involvement is not purely intellectual. In the seventh sequence, the long duration of
the shots emphasises the presence of colour and the geometry of the confined spaces
of the prison. The desert-like space of the prison yard and the surrounding fields, in
relation to the worn-out grey walls of the prison corridors, take on an autonomous
sense through the slow tracking shots. It is as if the time inscribed is a time of
desolation and decadence. The absence of non-diegetic music reinforces the material

67
force of the sequence, which stands on a parallel level with that of its narrative drive.
The mise en scène that Bazin envisioned as providing the spectator with space to
reach his/her conclusion, where everything appears in spatial uniformity, is
combined here with a montage aesthetic where the elements of the mise en scène
collide in order for a new concept to be born. The two sequences deliver the
ideological battle of the period. Instead of being part of an ahistorical existential
angst, the silence becomes a material protest carried forward through the form of the
film. The silence is not a statement on the ambiguous nature of things, such as that
which Bordwell sees in the art films of authors like Ingmar Bergman and
Michelangelo Antonioni at the end of the sixties. 22 It is an attempt at the revelation
of the truth but not through Eisenstein’s cinema fist propagating the advent of the
working class as the agent of truth or the party as the carrier of true consciousness in
the manner of Georg Lukács. 23 The collision here we could claim has a longer
duration, it is not immediate. It is presented in a manner which leaves it up to the
viewer to sense.

The sequence with the phonograph at the prison yard is another prime example of
how Angelopoulos delivers the aesthetics of montage within the long take. Sofianos
has demanded to be able to listen to music in his cell. In response, a phonograph is
placed in the yard under his cell. The song played is a love song typical of the thirties
and usually identified as music for the upper middle classes. The song is in contrast
with the environment. It also runs contrast with the tune of the folk song that is
whistled in a previous sequence by one of the prisoners in the yard right before the
attempted escape. In reaction to the song played on the phonograph, the prisoners
bang on their cell windows to protest. The noise of the bars being continuously
struck is stopped by the guards firing in the air after being summoned to the yard
during the protest. The soundscape here becomes a carrier of an ideological battle.
The gunfire provides the resolution. It is the sound of authority. This diegetic audio
montage becomes the carrier of the action instead of functioning as a carpet to the
action. This does not fracture the unity of the long sequence shots whose power
depends on the building up of these contrasts in a unified space. But instead of
evoking a predetermined ecstasy, they contribute towards a feeling of speculation.

68
The camera in turn does not merely record movement inside the frame: it is a source
of movement. In the phonograph sequence, the shot presents a wide and continuous
visual field that can narrow or expand through the slow pace of the camera that
moves as if at will. The movement is not that of a steadicam travelling among the
evolving action following the characters’ movements. It is the slow movement of the
tracking shot that while lingering on a parallel axis to the field of action becomes
mobile, acquiring autonomous subjectivity. The camera acquires autonomy yet does
not offer omniscience. The overhead tracking shots in the prison corridors convey a
sense of an onlooker but the camera is often left behind when the characters enter a
room and left facing a closed door. These are not objective shots per se. The high
angle and the parallel movement of the camera when the guards are summoned
during the riot in the prison might reflect the framings of Kenji Mizogushi, but here
they denote an impersonal subjectivity that looks back in history marking the trail of
opposing forces without the ability to intervene. The recording of space during the
waiting in the first sequence and the wandering of the camera inside the prison walls
also create breathing space for the viewer, who in search of a point of reference is
evaluating the acts that have been shown to him up to that particular point in the
narrative. The spectator is thus forced to abandon the privilege of a comfortable
journey through time and space and must take on an active viewing role in order to
dialectically relate to the image.

A further effect of the camera is that instead of providing psychological depth to the
characters, it treats them as types. The absence of non-diegetic soundtrack, the use of
panoramic shots combined with takes where the camera stands immobile at a 90°
position from a flat surface, erasing depth, are formal means to avoid a psychological
investment in the image. At times the movement of the actors becomes denaturalised
and mechanical.

The sequence with the foreign ambassadors standing at the seashore is one where the
naturalisation of the scene is reduced not only by the fact that all the ambassadors are
dressed in white but also mainly through the use of song and the type of movement.

69
The grotesque face of the Greek ambassador intensified by his short stature – an
evident allusion to Metaxas – carry the complexes of inferiority shared by a regime
that as we see in this particular sequence functions as a state ran by errand boys. The
director’s view of state representatives is not far from comical. As he himself notes,
the film for him is a black comedy. 24 The Greek ambassador carries a rifle over his
shoulder, but his presence does not convey any sense of fear. The foreign middle-
aged aristocrats resemble more middle-class bourgeois and this is not accidental.
Their wives stand aside as the men talk and are reduced to decorative items. The
wives and the husbands form groups that do not intermingle. The image of the
bourgeoisie is one of degeneration. The Greek ambassador is singing a tune with
political connotations. It is a song in favour of the king which was sung during the
first Balkan wars by the royal troops on their way to claim Thessalonica. The old
division between those in favour of the king and the democrats is brought to the
present. The division is still existent in 1936, as was the war between conservative
and liberal powers at the time of the film’s production.

All the people in the shore sequence are dressed in white. The colour becomes the
emblem of the political elite who are playing a game of death. It is they who move
about in the film. The minister, the leader of the Conservative Party, the English
ambassador, his Greek equivalent and Kriezis’ mother are also all dressed in white.
As Eirini Stathi points out:

The costume is not a simple decoration/not simply decorative, but rather

an element of the form that builds the narrative of the film… In
Angelopoulos the costume is an identity, a testimony for a period in
time, for an environment. This doesn’t come forward through a simple
sentimental story. The costume is interrelated with the architectural
space that the hero is traversing. It is that space (together with the
costume) that informs the audience about the hero’s identity even if he
appears ‘on stage’ without uttering a word, just by being there. 25

70
The space is occupied by an authoritative power. Every shot of the film includes this
sense of oppression. The oppressed are reduced to background figures. The political
prisoners fail to escape; the worker who was standing next to the assassinated
spokesman hides; the crowd scatters right after the lethal shot and the left wing is
reduced to children throwing white objects on empty streets and prisoners being
silenced by guards firing. The time they occupy in the narrative is also very limited.
The action is occupied by the personae of authority and the space is predominated by
the major space of oppression, the prison. Men in white suits move in, out and
around it. They resemble ringmasters of a burlesque show, with men in uniform
helping them to carry out their show.

In terms of diegesis the spectator does not get closer to any resolution, which would
normally be expected from a political thriller. As Makis Trikoypis points out the
audience is left in front of a closed door:

In contrast to the classical norm, every sequence that follows another,

instead of giving way to a resolution to questions raised in previous
sequences, raises new questions. Who was the one who really killed the
unionist? Who gave Sofianos to the police? What were his real relations
with Kriezis? Who gave him the gun? How was the professor convinced
to take full responsibility for the attempted poisoning of Sofianos? The
director refuses to talk about all these simply because he denies the
attitude of the omniscient author. 26

The narrative presents a framing of the unsaid where every important decision is
taken away from the eyes of the viewer. He/she remains in the dark. An absolute
censorship has been imposed on the form of the film. What is the secret being
murmured from prisoner to prisoner before the attempted escape of the prisoners?
Who is Sofianos? What does the lawyer Mavroides find out during his visit to the
refuge of Sofianos’ friend? Everything has already occurred before the spectator has
a hint of what is going on. Things happen, the camera records them but the inability
to act is ever-present. The facts become details of a dramatisation never to be

71
performed. Furthermore, there is no main character in the film for the audience to
identify with as the agent of the action. Even if we assume that Sofianos is the main
character, the audience only sees him at the moment of his arrest. Even then he is too
far from the lens of the camera for a spectator to feel close to him/identify with him
emotionally. From then on the camera will only frame the outside door of his prison
cell. Although his cell functions as a point of reference for the unraveling of the
action, he does nothing to initiate it. He is confined. Everything functions around him
without his interference. Angelopoulos presents a very complex structure of power
relations where direct action becomes almost unfathomable.

Days of ’36 owes greatly to Round Up (1966) by Miklos Janscó. In the film of the
Hungarian director the action takes place in a prison where Hungarian
revolutionaries are being held during the Hungarian revolution against Romania at
the end of the 19th century. As in Days of ’36, the treatment of the architectural space
evokes a feeling of desolation, especially since the prison is located in the middle of
a dry, open valley. Long takes and slow camera movement are present in both films.
Yet in Janscó the dialectic between master and slave becomes a master signifier
where the characters shift from the identity of the master to that of the slave in a
circular order. The master of one becomes slave to another in a circular universe of
domination, a universe that makes struggle impossible, creating a pessimistic circle
where the viewer is left watching helpless and unable to identify who is who. It is as
if every sequence repeats the absorbing space of a stagnant dialectic, of a violent
structure that defines every action.

In Angelopoulos likewise there is no identification with prime agents in the

narrative. The distance of the camera evokes a structural field where human agents
are employed in an impersonal game of power. Yet this power game does not
permeate every social field as it does in Janscó. Angelopoulos’ film is about a
particular historical moment as an allegory for contemporary political affairs in
Greece. The film cannot be seen in the light of an ahistorical superstructure that
cancels out history. The circular motif of the film is not an attempt to characterise a
human condition. The degeneration belongs to a particular political system. Social

72
groups are not equated under the same function. The agents of dissent are
marginalised but do not follow the same patterns of behaviour as the ruling class.
Angelopoulos’ film is about censorship. This does not prevent him from employing a
polemic attitude. We might be standing in front of a closed door but the act of
making this visible is in itself a call to action.

1
See Βασίλης Ραφαηλίδης, Ιστορία (Κωμικοτραγική) του Νεοελληνικού Κράτους 1830-1974, Εκδόσεις
Εικοστού Πρώτου, Αθήνα, 1993, p.411-412.
For a more detailed discussion on the role of the C.I.A. in the coup see Αλέξης Παπαχελάς, Ο Βιασμός
της Ελληνικής Δημοκρατίας: Ο Αμερικάνικος Παράγων 1947-1967, Εκδόσεις Εστία, Αθήνα, 1997.
2
See Rodis Roufos, Culture and the Military, in Greece Under Military Rule, ed. Richard Clogg and
George Yannopoulos, Secker and Warburg, London, p. 147. See also Βασίλης Ραφαηλίδης, Ιστορία
(Κωμικοτραγική) του Νεοελληνικού Κράτους 1830-1974, Εκδόσεις Εικοστού Πρώτου, Αθήνα, 1993, p.
424.
3
Rodis Roufos, ibid. p. 146-159.
4
Rodis Roufos, ibid. p.151.
5
See Κωνσταντίνος Θέμελης, Θόδωρος Αγγελόπουλος-το Παρελθόν σαν Ιστορία το μέλλον ως Φόρμα,
Ύψιλον/βιβλία, Αθήνα, 1998, p.122.
6
Interview with the author, June 2005, unpublished.
7
Franco Cordelli, ‘Η Σκηνοθεσία του Αγγελόπουλου’ in Θόδωρος Αγγελόπουλος, ed. Ειρήνη Στάθη,
Φεστιβάλ Κινηματογράφου Θεσσαλονίκης Εκδόσεις Καστανιώτη, Αθήνα, 2000, p 37.
8
Sergio Arreco, Θόδωρος Αγγελόπουλος, Εκδόσεις Ηράκλειτος, Αθήνα, 1985, p.56.
9
Interview with Κωνσταντίνος Θέμελης, ibid, p. 149-150.
10
Jean Mitry, quoted in Ειρήνη Στάθη, Χώρος και Χρόνος στο Κινηματογράφο του Θόδωρου
Αγγελόπουλου, Αιγόκερως, Αθήνα 1999, p.160-161.
11
Ειρήνη Στάθη, Χώρος και Χρόνος στο Κινηματογράφο του Θόδωρου Αγγελόπουλου, ibid. p. 161.
12
David Bordwell, Figures Traced in Light: On Cinematic Staging, University of California Press,
Berkley Los Angeles London, 2005, p.147.
13
Andre Bazin, ‘The Myth of Total Cinema’, in Film Theory and Criticism, ed. Leo Braudy &
Marshall Cohen, Oxford University Press, 1999, p. 201.
14
See Rudolph Arnheim, Film as Art, London, Faber, 1958 (first published 1932), p. 54.
15
See Robert Stam, Film Theory – An Introduction, Blackwell Publishers, Maiden Massachusetts, pp.
60-61.
16
See André Bazin, ‘The Evolution of the Language of Cinema’ in What is Cinema?, University of
California Press, Berkley and Los Angeles, 1967, p.26.
17
André Bazin, ‘The Evolution of the Language of Cinema’ in What is Cinema, ibid., pp. 35-36.
18
Theo Angelopoulos, interview with the author, unpublished, June 2005.
19
See Sergei Eisenstein, ‘The Montage of Film Attractions’ in Eisenstein Writings Volume 1: 1922-
34, BFI Publishing / Indiana University Press, London Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1988, pp. 41-
42.
20
Sergei Eisenstein, ‘The Dramaturgy of Film Form’ in Eisenstein Writings Volume 1: 1922- 34,
ibid., pp. 163-164.

73
21
Sergei Eisenstein quoted in Τάκης Αντωνόπουλος, Κινηματογράφος-Επιστήμη-Ιδεολογία,
Αντίλογος, Αθήνα, 1972, p. 124.
22
David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film, Routledge, London, 1998, pp.232-233.
23
Georg Lukács in his History and Class Consciousness questions the nature of a true revolutionary
subject. Seeing the world as class divided between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, Lukács sees in
the proletariat the potential for revolutionary action. The question then becomes how the proletariat
acquires a proper class consciousness in order to act. Lukács declares that the Communist Party, being
the organised form of the proletariat, is the bearer of the correct class consciousness. For a detailed
analysis of the issue of class consciousness along with a critique on Lukács’ model see John
Holloway, Change the World Without Taking Power – The Meaning of Revolution Today, Pluto Press,
London Sterling Virginia, 2002, pp. 80-88.
24
Interview with the author, unpublished, June 2005.
25
Ειρήνη Στάθη, Χώρος και Χρόνος στο Κινηματογράφο του Θόδωρου Αγγελόπουλου, ibid. p. 59.
26
Μάκης Τρικούπης, ‘Μπροστά σε μια κλειστή Πόρτα’ in Θόδωρος Αγγελόπουλος, ed. Ειρήνη Στάθη,
Φεστιβάλ Κινηματογράφου Θεσσαλονίκης Εκδόσεις Καστανιώτη, Αθήνα , 2000, p.228.

74
 THE TRAVELLING PLAYERS / Ο ΘΙΑΣΟΣ

The film starts in 1952 when a troupe of actors arrives in the town of Aigio. The
narrative almost immediately shifts to 1939 when we see the troupe arriving at the
same town. They are moving around Greece staging a rural play called ‘Golfo the
Shepherdess’. The travelling players, schematised as figures from the Atreides fable,
become a vessel in a voyage through recent Greek history. They both witness and
take part in the major historical events that shaped modern Greece, from the end of
the Metaxas dictatorship until the end of the civil war and the establishment of the
right wing government of Papagos in 1951.

The Travelling Players is the second film in the Trilogy of History. Shooting started
in the autumn of 1973 and was completed in 1975 after the restoration of the
democratic regime. The film was screened the same year at the Cannes International
Film Festival but only as part of the Director’s Week and not in competition. The
rightwing government of Konstantinos Karamanlis which had come to power after
the fall of the junta refused to let the film be entered into competition due to its
political content, an act that deprived Angelopoulos the chance of winning the Palme
D’Or for the film that became his landmark. It should also be noted that the film was
not eligible for competition because Angelopoulos registered the film exclusively as
a private production. 1 Thiassos was the last film he made with Georgios Papalios as
producer.

The director started the main part of the shoot a few months before the fall of the
junta, now led by Dimitris Ioannidis who had overthrown Colonel Papadopoulos at
the end of 1973. The second phase of the junta was more severe in terms of public
prosecutions of leftwing supporters. In the previous year the country witnessed the
invasion by the army of the university campus of Athens Polytechnic on the 17th of
November. Students had occupied the premises to protest against the military regime.
Angelopoulos had just finished filming the first exterior shots of the film in which

75
Electra lures a fascist youth in a hotel room only to ridicule him by letting him stand
naked in front of the camera, as she suddenly leaves the room. The interiors were
shot a year later when the film shoot started again. When events at the Polytechnic
started, the director stopped filming and joined the students on the very same day the
army went in. At the Polytechnic he signed a petition against the junta together with
other filmmakers. The petition was transmitted on the radio station that the students
had set up on the campus. The night that the army went in, Angelopoulos escaped
from the campus and finally took refuge at Papalios’ house, who as Themelis notes
was above suspicion. 2 While the police were looking for him to bring him in for
interrogation, Angelopoulos fled to Paris for twenty days.

On his return the director had to face the obstacle of the pre-censorship committee in
order to restart the shoot. He avoided pre-censorship thanks to a minister of the junta
who was an ex-schoolmate and gave his approval to the script without anybody
having read it. In addition Angelopoulos gained permission to use the police and the
army for the requirements of the film. The absurdist effect was that Angelopoulos
had access to state infrastructure in order to make a film accusation against fascist
elements that had been lurking in Greece in the last thirty-five years.

The first phase of the shoot lasted from the 12th of February until the 30th of March
1974. When local authorities asked the director what he was shooting, he claimed
that he was shooting either a rural love story Golfo, or an appropriation of the myth
of the Atreides. Angelopoulos shot the film on location. In many cases during the
shoot, the crew had to remove political grafitti from walls before they could shoot. 3
During an exterior shoot, the crowds had to sing the national anthem instead of the
partisan song they were supposed to sing. The correct song was later dubbed in
postproduction. During the 1946 New Year’s Eve sequence which was shot in a
night club in the northern suburbs of Athens, the army stormed onto the set after the
owner of the club informed them that he overheard anti-royalist songs coming from
the set. Angelopoulos was forced to demonstrate a fake film rehearsal where the
band on stage played exclusively royalist songs.

76
The second phase of the shoot lasted from the 5th of November until the 15th of
December 1975. The junta had collapsed, so Angelopoulos was able to shoot the
exterior takes of the Leftist groups clashing with the Royalists as well as all the
scenes that included demonstrations and red flags. It would have been impossible to
film these scenes during the rule of the junta. Needless to say the film would never
have made it into Greek cinemas if the military regime had not collapsed.

Thiassos was awarded nine prizes at the Thessaloniki Film Festival the following
year. It was the first festival after the fall of the junta and had a strong political
impetus. The mass audiences declared it the first Greek Film Festival of the People.
During previous years, festivalgoers had seen the festival as a forum in which they
could protest against the junta. Audiences often booed the commercial melodramas
that were promoted by major studios for their lack of artistic and political impetus. It
was the festivalgoers themselves who launched the award of the Audience Prize
without any previous arrangement with the organizers of the festival and it was one
of their representatives who stepped onto the stage during the closing ceremony and
gave the award to Angelopoulos. In previous years, all the screenings were held with
the presence of policemen inside the theatre. Now there was a strong demand for
their removal. Public demonstrations were often held in the cinema. The festival was
characterized by a strong euphoric atmosphere and it was the first time in its short
history that the audience approved all the awards that were given. 4 Thiassos went on
to receive wide international attention and was awarded the Grand Prize for the Arts
in Japan in 1979. The film also features among the best hundred films in the history
of film according to the International Association of Film Critics (FIPRESCI).

The narrative of The Travelling Players

There is nothing that commends a story to memory more effectively than

that chaste compactness which precludes psychological analyses. And the
more natural the process by which the storyteller forgoes psychological

77
 shading, the greater becomes the story’s claim to place in the memory of
the listener. 5

The extract is from Walter Benjamin’s essay the Storyteller – Reflections on The
Work of Nikolai Leskov. In The Storyteller Benjamin draws on the workings of
Leskov to give the image of the modern aoidos (Αοιδός). According to Giannis K.
Kordatos, an aoidos was a narrator of epic poetry in antiquity whose presence is not
confined to preclassical Greece but extends back to the pre-Greek civilizations of
the Mediterranean and the Middle East. 6 He was part of an oral tradition and was
seen as a combination of a chanter and a holy man, a person who was inspired by
the Muses to sing the glory of the heroes whose acts were the subject of epic
poetry. That by extension should be seen as the praise of the Genus. The Genus
describes the groups of people who gathered around a king and barricaded
themselves around a castle wall for protection from bandit raids in a period anterior
to rise of the State in the 9th century B.C. The kings during that period which goes
back to 2200 B.C. did not have rule of domination over their subjects as they did
after the 9th century B.C., nor did they enjoy hereditary rights to the throne. Epic
poetry reflects a pre-individualistic society whose basic communal monad is the
Genus. It is a period anterior to the first private ownerships out of which the
individual emerges in the 9th century B.C. Despite this, the two Homeric poems of
Greek antiquity, namely the Iliad and the Odyssey, centering on events during and
after the Trojan War, which occurred around 1200 B.C. according to most
historians, reflect social relations that came after the dissolution of the Genus. For
Giannis K. Kordatos this is the proof that the Homeric epics were not written in one
linear narrative at one moment in time. 7 What they reflect instead are the variations
that the poems were subjected to through the oral tradition of the aoidos. The
narrator of epic poetry should be seen as a transmitter. He relies on the Muses for
inspiration and his stories are those of the acts of heroes who are often the leaders
of the Genus.

In the Storyteller Benjamin draws on the first principle of epic poetry: the oral
tradition. Benjamin sees in Leskov the image of a collector rather than an

78
individual creator. The ancient aoidos recites the great poems of antiquity. Yet
each recounting is different from the previous one, since it is based on an oral
tradition, rather than a given text that can be memorised and passed on from
generation to generation. What is crucial for the idea of the storyteller is the
encounter between the storyteller and the listener. It is an act that establishes
communion, in contrast to a solitary reading of a novel. Benjamin sees recurrent
motifs in Leskov that reflect an image of communal life in the passage of time. The
storyteller now is not anonymous like the aoidos and his function is not that of a
channel of divine inspiration. Now the images of the past are filtered through his
subjectivity and the effect is one of mythopoeic resonance where reality and fiction
merge.

Similarly my reading of Angelopoulos’ film is of a work whose function lies close

to the principle of a collector of images. Angelopoulos becomes a storyteller as he
attempts to draw a map of modern Greece giving shape to images retrieved from
history and not from his own psyche. The image aims to sustain an open dialogue
with the spectator. As in his previous films, the image shows rather than narrates.
The parallelism with the notion of the storyteller does not imply that Angelopoulos
uses the images as a means to visualise a written story. It denotes rather the
dialectic function of an image that asks for the viewer’s participation. It is a
function that invites the viewer to return to the film more than once, possibly for a
different reading.

Angelopoulos employs the myth of the Atreides and places it in the recent historical
context of Greece. It is a grand project. Yet this is not a chauvinistic attempt to
sketch a homogenous national history where the community endures the passing of
time. On the one hand, the myth is a product of communal life. It belongs to no
individual author and its origins are lost in the depths of time. The use of myth in
the film carries this resonance. At the same time the film maintains a critical
distance. As a narrative structure the myth does not imply a heroic mythic past that
resonates in Greece through the centuries. It denotes the presence of particular
principles with antiquity but it also lays bare the differences between historical

79
times. The myth here is not used as a model that explains history. It is used first and
foremost as a vehicle for the unraveling of the story. On a second level as noted
above it denotes the presence of principles whose historical origins are lost in time
leaving a myth as their remains.

In Thiassos, myth and history collide, creating a plane where the fictional
characters are carried away by historical events that entangle them both as agents
and spectators. The film is an account of the microcosm of the troupe. Yet this is
not the recounting of personal dramas with historical events serving as a
background for the unraveling of individual pathos. Many sequences leave the
troupe out of the picture and history comes to the forefront. The characters also lack
psychological depth. What is of interest is their subjectivity as shaped by the
function of a group.

The film centres on the journey of the troupe as they move about rural Greece
performing the folk play Golfo the Shepherdess throughout a time span of twelve
years: from 1939 to 1951. The film follows the troupe from the last years of the
dictatorship of Metaxas to the outbreak of the Greco-Italian war in 1940 (signifying
Greece’s entry into World War Two), the Nazi Occupation in 1941 and the Greek
Resistance, the Liberation in 1944 and the British Occupation, the Battle of Athens
in December 1944 where the Democrats fought the Royalists who were aided by
the British and finally through the civil war that ended in 1949. The narrative
moves back and forth in time between 1951, which marks the re-establishment of
the Right, and 1939, just before the start of the Greco-Italian war.

The characters in the film function on three levels. They are the historically situated
subjects who are trying to perform a play; they are metaphors for the characters of
the ancient myth and finally they are also the characters of the rural play Golfo.
Thiassos becomes a field in which myth is subjected to history, as the director puts
it. 8 The whole troupe becomes a microcosm of Greece, reflecting the major
ideological clashes that shaped modern Greek history. The head of the troupe, the
father, represents Agamemnon. He arrived as an immigrant from Asia Minor

80
having lost all his relatives. His life will end in front of a Nazi firing squad during
the Occupation that lasted from 1941 to 1944. He functions both as an individual
and as a representative of immigrants who fled to Greece after the Asia Minor
catastrophe in 1922. The father coming to Greece as a refugee supported Prime
Minister Eleftherios Venizelos who was responsible for the Asia Minor expedition
at the end of the Second Balkan War: an expedition where Greece sought to annex
the area around Smyrna in the Asia Minor coast. Venizelos, however, lost the
elections to the Royalists during the expedition and his supporters held the King
and his administration to be responsible for the failure of the expedition that ended
with the revolution of the Neo Turks, who not only rebuffed the Greek army but
also drove out or exterminated the entire Greek population that lived in the Asia
Minor coast. Venizelos clashed with the palace, a conflict that was passed on to his
supporters. The train sequence where the father gives an account of the historical
event known as the Asia Minor Catastrophe in front of the camera, provides the
schema between the Royalists and the Democrats. The characters of Orestes,
Pylades and the Poet represent the active radical forces that sided with the
Communist Party. Quite early in the film we see all three reading Lenin’s
Bankruptcy of the 2nd International from a brochure. All three of them will join the
Resistance during the Nazi Occupation and will later fight against the Royalist
troops that were allied first to the British and then the American army during the
civil war that erupted in 1946 and ended in 1949 with the defeat of the Democrats.
At the end of the film, Orestes is executed by the fascists, Pylades is arrested,
tortured and forced to sign a petition of repentance and the Poet after being arrested
too is driven to madness.

We can say that Electra is the main character of the film. Following the line of the
two tragedies in the Atreidian cycle, the two Electras by Euripides and Aeschylus
respectively, Angelopoulos places Elektra at the centre of the story. Her function
though as I will demonstrate is very different both from the staging of a character
from an ancient tragedy and from a hero in a modern psychological drama. She
represents the people who remained in the cities and endured the Nazi Occupation
and oppression by the fascist collaborators, who in turn found shelter under the

81
Royalists during the civil war. Her role is not passive. During the Occupation we
see her luring an Italian officer to a hotel room leaving him naked in front of the
camera. She openly opposes Aigisthos and aids the Resistance.

Chrysothemis is Electra’s sister. Her role is contrasted to the ethical status of her
sibling. She stands indifferent to the popular struggles that mark the period and
eventually marries an American soldier after the American troops become directly
involved in the civil war having taken over from the British.

Aigisthos is a supporter of Fascism. He supports the pre-war dictatorship of

Metaxas and then collaborates with the occupying Nazi forces. It is he who goes to
the Nazis to accuse the father of helping the Resistance. The father is executed and
Aigisthos then becomes head of the troupe. At his side at the head of the troupe is
Clytemnestra, Agamemnon’s wife. She is later executed onstage together with her
lover by her son Orestes during a performance of Golfo.

The narrative is not presented from the point of view of any of the characters.
Everything appears through the distant gaze of the camera that traverses a visual
plane in a slow, almost ritualistic trek. Like in Angelopoulos’ previous film, the
camera observes rather than shedding light on the inner condition of the characters.
The characters do not evolve as psychological individuals. In Citizen Kane for
example the identity of the word “Rosebud” is related to the main character and its
signification obscured and bifurcated. The transparent object that falls from the
hands of the dying Kane becomes an image of ambiguous signification, not a
symbol but a pointer to his subjectivity. Žižek refers to the glass object as the
Lacanian objet petit a, an object in which the subjectivity of the person is invested
and through which the objective world holds its order. 9 It is as if the world shines
immersed through the singular subjectivity of the beholder. In Thiassos the world
is not seen through the eyes of any of the actors. Personal trauma does not push the
narrative forward. Electra is raped by Fascists in 1944 yet this moment loses its
dramatic tension as it is placed dialectically before her narrative about the
demonstrations of December 1944 known as the Δεκεμβριανά (Dekemvriana). Her

82
narrative is presented as a testimony delivered direct to camera. Her personal
trauma opens up to reflect the violence that the Left suffered by the occupying
forces. Similarly the red scarf of the poet is not a symbolic object of his
individuality nor is it charged with personal connotations. It is an object that opens
the character up to the idea of revolution, which then mobilises him to act.

Gilberto Perez points out that drama, in contrast to the epic narrative, requires
things to be seen by the characters or from the perspective of the plot and through a
present placed in relation to the past and what we as spectators anticipate will
happen in the future. Dramatic tension is raised only when what appears needs the
anticipation of the other. 10 In The Travelling Players the other is reduced to the
present of the shot. What appears is always in relation to the now of the shot. The
screen duration of the film is four hours and fifteen minutes and it is divided into
almost 120 shots. The film is exemplary in its use of the sequence shot. As Lino
Micciché points out, there are only about twenty times where the director edits two
or three shots in order to form a sequence. 11 The narrative can be divided into
sixteen main episodes that contain smaller narrative sequences. Each episode ends
with a fade out. Each sequence, often identified with a single take, points at a
completed action. The narrative does not proceed in a linear cause and effect
pattern. The episodes function autonomously in relation to the unraveling of the
action.

In the sequence of the first rehearsal of the play Golfo in the hotel yard right before
the first appearance of Orestes, the camera follows the gaze of the characters as if to
designate the space for the rehearsal. The relation between the perspective of the
camera and that of the characters is not one of cause and effect. In one sequence
shot the camera follows the movement of the troupe as they enter the hotel yard and
then climb up some exterior stairs onto a balcony where each member then retires
to his or her room. The camera turns slightly to follow their exit and then returns to
fix the frame in the centre of the balcony in what Eirini Stathi calls reframing. 12
The camera is correcting the frame while it is left recording the empty balcony and
the closed doors. Without a cut the characters re-enter the frame and stand in line

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on the balcony staring at the offscreen yard. The camera follows their gaze
offscreen to the left and with a semi-circular movement frames the empty yard in a
manner of a theatre stage with the background wall at a 90° angle from the camera
lens. The characters enter the frame from the sides delivering their lines as
characters from the play Golfo. The rehearsal is interrupted by the arrival of
Orestes.

It seems as if the camera were examining the space in order to inquire into the
characters’ gazes rather than identify with them. The camera pans and then reaches
an immobile state while turning the space it is recording into a theatre stage. The
characters enter from the sides of the frame. The camera then abandons the action
for a different space where the characters enter re-introducing the action. The
absence of the cut and the continuous slow movement of the crane shot records the
movement of the troupe in terms of a procession. What we have in the above
sequence is pure description and generation of movement. From the perspective of
the plot the sequence could be exhausted in a continuity shot lasting no more than
half a minute. Yet by stretching out the duration of the shot the director brings to
the foreground the process of filming as an act of spatial inquiry. Instead of
passively following the movement of the actors as bearers of the action, the camera
participates in the designation of the visual field. It waits for the actors to re-enter
the frame and then follows their gaze offscreen. This is a movement whose cause is
split between the diegetic need to follow the characters’ gaze and that of an
autonomous movement. It is an act of conscious choice to frame the space as a
theatre stage. Perez notes that in the Homerian epics, the world described stands as
it is. 13 There are no ambiguities generated by the personal investment of the
characters in the real world. Description becomes the means by which dramatic
tension is put aside in favour of a narrative that avoids ambiguity. We can see one
element of this description functioning in Thiassos. The long duration of the shot
and the slow tracking movement of the camera shift the viewer’s attention from the
evolving drama to a spatial inquiry. It is not that everything that lies off-frame is
reduced to nothingness. What appears is always in relation to what lies beyond the
edges of the frame. The characters enter and re-enter the frame continuously while

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the camera lingers on the same spatial field. Yet as we have already established in
the introduction, the focus is always on the presence of the shot. But at the same
time it is this present tense that unlike a Homeric epic declares the impersonal
subjectivity of the camera, the presence of a consciousness, the consciousness of
the storyteller.

The act of recording the space in a continuous visual field does not fall under the
restrictions of a genre. It becomes an emblem of authorial signature. There is no
predetermined drive or generic logic that demands that the troupe return to the
balcony after having entered their rooms. Similarly there is not a predetermined
narrative that designates the route of events. This is the meaning of the continuous
disruptions that occur throughout the film. The troupe never manages to finish a
single performance, as if the film were designating the impossibility of safety, of a
teleological universe. Similarly, Orestes who in the ancient fable returns as an
avenging angel in order to restore justice and order, now avenges the death of his
father but he cannot offer more than a momentary victory over injustice. The
revenge becomes an event. In the film Orestes kills Clytemnestra and Aigisthos
onstage during a performance of Golfo and the audience applauds, thinking that this
is part of the performance. We as spectators know the truth and we might even
draw a feeling of satisfaction when Aigisthos, who has tormented the rest of the
troupe so much, is finally avenged. This feeling however will soon lapse when
Orestes is put to death by the fascists.

We could argue that Angelopoulos both laments and celebrates this flux. Since
there is no predetermined narrative that will reach an end, we as humans are left in
front of a vacuum. We can say that Angelopoulos presents us with this vacuum, this
space where things assemble and disassemble. The camera lingers on the empty
space of the yard until the actors return. Orestes dies; the dream of the Left
evaporates, leaving the actors moving about Greece in 1952 in a seeming vacuum,
but they reassemble from this vacuum and little Orestes, the son of Chrysothemis
who is taken under Electra’s wing, returns, maybe for the staging of another act.

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The film becomes a spatial enquiry dominated by a movement based on dialectics.
Angelopoulos’ view of modern Greek history records the movement between two
poles, the Right and the Left. This is demonstrated clearly in the sequence of the
demonstrations that follow Electra’s account of the 1944 December
demonstrations. This is the tenth episode which consists solely of one long take. It
covers the period from September to December 1944. The director edits the action
of two distinct incidents that belong to a different spatio-temporal situation in one
long take. We could argue that Angelopoulos performs a type of internal montage
which allows the action to unravel in time so that the spectator can witness the
process by which the movement will acquire its full meaning.

A crane long shot records the crowds as they gathers in a square carrying
American, British, Soviet and Greek flags and singing a song of national unity. It is
right after liberation from the Nazis and the people are demanding a government of
national unity with the participation of the communists. While the camera keeps
recording the crowd from behind, gunshots are heard from off-screen. The crowd
scatters. The camera follows their movement as they disappear into the streets
around the square. It turns a full circle and then returns to the same starting point.
Three bodies lie on the square. The sound of a bagpipe comes off-screen from the
right. A Scottish military piper makes his way into the frame and walks parallel to
the lens before exiting to the left. After the piper disappears one of the three people
that lie on the square starts to move. He gets up and starts running away to the left
side of the square. The camera follows his movement with a pan until the man
disappears into an alley at the sides of the square. Without a pause the camera
continues its circular movement and comes to meet the crowds returning to the
square from another street. Now they are exclusively under red flags. The camera
after having performed a second full circle is put on a standstill while framing the
crowds from behind as before.

The square turns into a choreographed battlefield. The camera performs a double
circular movement and records the people as an ensemble who scatter when coming
under fire only to reunite under the banner of Communism. The first demonstration

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is abruptly put to a stop by gunfire in a manner reminiscent of Days of ’36 where,
during the opening sequence, a unionist is executed by a shot that comes from off-
screen. We never see the murderers. Now the Scottish piper enters the frame and
crosses the empty square parallel to the lens of the camera. The censorship that
Angelopoulos imposed on his previous film now turns into a direct accusation. The
sequence is a representation of events that occurred between September and
December 1944. With a double circular movement, the camera marks a space
where the crowds move in and out in their determination to prevail. The Scottish
piper is a signifier of the British troops who opened fire against the peaceful
demonstrators in December, an act that united all the anti-Royalists under the
banner of the Communist Party (the return of the crowd under red flags). The
movement inside the frame breaks away from the representation of empirical
movement and substitutes it with a slow choreography that brings in direct contrast
elements that are ideologically charged. They are edited inside the shot to form a
montage that unlike Eisenstein’s notion of montage of attractions, it does not
function through shock but is formed gradually according to the rhythm of the shot
that records movement in real time. 14 The sequence shot is both an intellectual and
emotional image. The shot delivers a fascination with group dynamics brought
forward through the dialectics of movement and stasis that regulates the movement
of the demonstrators as they come in and out of the frame. The same dialectic is felt
in the camera movement which describes a circle before stopping still and facing
the square.

This visual orchestration of the demonstrations marks a break with naturalism. I

will now demonstrate how this break owes greatly to the theories of Bertolt Brecht
and how Angelopoulos reads the epic in relation to Greek history.

The Epic

Epic theatre emerged in the mid-1920s and declared war on naturalism and
Aristotelian drama as the latter was perceived in the German theatre of the time.

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Brecht, keeping in line with the German Expressionist Movement of the 1920s that
introduced the idea of the character as a social type and not an individual identity,
presented a theatre that would resist the psychological rendering of characters that
in turn resulted in the spectator falling into a state of empathy with the action on
stage. By means of distanciation, Brecht sought to make the audience apprehend
the real identities of objects, events and gestures as they appear on stage.
Naturalism became suspected of hiding bourgeoisie ideology. Brecht argued that
the subject matter ought to be revealed in its true identity, as a product of social
relations. The formal means by which Brecht opposed naturalism was the exposing
of the means of production during the performances of his plays. The breakdown of
the fourth wall convention, the direct exposure of theatre lights and the visibility of
an orchestra that performed live during acts were among others a means to fight
illusionism on stage. The Brechtian stage, instead of being realistic, emphasised the
fact that the audience was watching a performance. Through the use of elliptical
settings, the breakdown of the plot into an episodic narrative that prevented
suspense and first and foremost the use of the Gest, Brecht attempted to counter the
psychological investments that an audience would apply to a naturalist drama.
Brecht, who concentrated on the social identities of the characters in his plays, saw
the developing action of naturalist dramas as a means that invested in the
psychological identity of a character and as a form that made audiences empathise
with the characters, thus minimising their critical power. With the Gest Brecht
described the movement of the actor as being other than itself, as commenting upon
the character rather than identifying with him/her. The critical distance that the
spectator ought to have from the performance should also be the subject of the
actors’ performance. In accordance Brecht favored montage instead of linearity.
The development of the action was put to a halt through the use of film projections
in the middle of acts or in between acts and through the use of music as a means to
comment on rather than heighten the action. Brecht saw theatre as an extension of
social life and aimed at the emancipation of the working classes from an oppressing
bourgeoisie ideology that for him used theatre as an object for consumption and as
propagation for bourgeois values. 15

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Brecht’s ideas were widely reinvented for cinema during the 1960s through
filmmakers like Godard and Straub-Huillet in France and later on Kluge in
Germany. Their films carry a strong self-reflexive and political impetus. Godard, in
films like Vivre Sa Vie (1962), Alphaville (1965) and Two or Three Things I Know
About Her (1967), breaks down the development of a continuous action through the
use of intertitles in the narrative, jump cuts and the disjoining of the soundtrack
from the image. The actors often turn directly towards the camera as if addressing
the viewers of the film, thus emphasising the presence of the medium.

Thiassos is not a Godardian film. Angelopoulos does not employ an anarchist

breakdown of narrative forms neither does he immerse himself in extreme
experimentation. Although his career as a filmmaker started after the events of
1968 and he retained a strong affinity with the student movement, he clearly
belongs to an older generation with less radical tendencies. His filmic gaze remains
rooted in the films of Orson Welles and Kenji Mizogushi. Yet it is the main
principles of the Epic as opposed to a naturalist realist drama based on mimesis and
identification that find their way into the film. Angelopoulos provides his own
reading of Brecht in his attempt to portray the movement of a collective subject. 16
Natural settings are often defamiliarised from their realist connotations by being
framed in a manner of a theatre stage like in the sequence of the Battle of Athens. 17
This sequence, which depicts the Leftists confronting the police and then the
English troops, does not convey a naturalist representation of a street fight. It
presents a carefully calculated choreography that alludes to the historical event
known as the Battle of Athens. The battle erupted after the systematic attempts of
the Royalists and the allied British forces to dismantle the forces of the Left. The
British army had by then turned into an occupying force.

The sequence is based on one long take that functions as a tableau. The camera
follows the movement of the troupe through the streets of Athens at night. The
sequence starts with the camera framing the troupe inside an open-air market. The
voice of a Leftist rebel coming from a loudspeaker is heard from offscreen. The
troupe is set in motion. The camera pans to the left and follows their movement. A

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group of rebels is seen coming from afar in deep focus from the left exit of the
market. Throughout the sequence the camera is placed inside the market together
with the troupe, while the opposing groups move in a semi-circular axis at the
periphery outside. We as viewers witness the movement of the opposing groups
through the three exits of the market. After we see the Leftists approaching, the
troupe makes a move from the left to the middle exit. The camera surpasses them as
it tracks to the right and then becomes immobile at the middle exit. The rebels pass
through. After the rebels pass the middle exit to the right towards the third, the
troupe moves parallel to the rebels’ track and the camera is set in motion again.
While it tracks to the right, the troupe hides at the left side of the third exit which is
also the main exit. The camera is still, facing the main exit at a 90° angle. A group
of policemen and paramilitaries in battle positions are occupying the street that
crosses the third exit. We see them in profile. They are facing the left side of the
frame. As soon as the camera stops moving, gunfire comes from offscreen left and
starts the battle. The policemen retreat offscreen to the right. The rebels then
occupy the street in front of the main exit. A man with a loudspeaker stands in front
and sings a rebel song. An explosion from a hand grenade interrupts his singing.
The street is cleared. The English troops make their way in from the right. Jeeps are
left occupying the street while the soldiers move offscreen to the left. The camera
tracks to the right abandoning the scene and meets the troupe as they try to make
their way out of the market. The camera follows them until they disappear
offscreen to the right and then stops still again. The voice of the rebel is heard
offscreen singing the rebel song that ends the sequence.

The action in the sequence described above takes place at a certain distance from
the camera lens. Even the troupe, although it is inside the market, appears at an
almost equal distance with the groups outside, since its members are moving almost
with their backs to the exits as they try to go unnoticed. The sequence thus
emphasises the agency of groups rather than that of individual actors. Once the
camera is immobilized and facing the entrance of the market, the scene turns into a
theatre stage with the houses at the sides of the road functioning as the back wall of
a theatre stage. Having the foreground inside the market in the shadows and the

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road lit supports the theatrical arrangement of the shot and aims to focus the
viewers’ attention on the background where the action takes place. When the
groups enter the frame we see them in profile. They move on an exact parallel axis
to the houses and the camera lens. The absence of diagonals that would enforce the
rendering of depth gives way to a parallel arrangement that reinforces the
impression of a two-dimensional field.

Angelopoulos breaks away from a traditional naturalist representation of depth and

stages a ritualistic shot that moves between theatre and shadow play. The
choreography of the two opposing sides is stylised as to break away from the
mimesis of empirical movement. The movement is choreographed as if the actors
belonged to an ensemble staging a theatre performance. The actors move in and out
of the frame as if from the sides of a stage. Each time a group makes an entrance it
then stands immobile; the actors freeze like statues. Even when they fire at each
other it looks mechanical. The rebels stand on the left side of the exit and the army
on the right.

The sequence is a comment, a representation of the Battle of Athens in one take.

The collision of ideologies is represented through the arrangement of the mise en
scène. The actual battle lasted for almost a month. Here, thirty days are compressed
into one take. The connoted message is conveyed without the intervention of
dialogue. There is no music added in postproduction to heighten dramatic tension.
The song of the rebels seals the dialectics of the image. The Battle of Athens was
lost for the Left. The English artillery was something that the rebels could not cope
with. When the Leftists take over the stage the explosion of a hand grenade pushes
them outside the frame to the left. The English artillery enters. The sequence starts
and ends with the same agitating rebel song heard offscreen. At the end of the
sequence however it is heard from far away, like an echo lamenting the loss of the
Left.

Speech gives way to the Gest which features throughout the film. The long take that
is traditionally seen as the landmark of realism opens up to incorporate the

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Brechtian Gest. The term refers primarily to the movement of the actor, which
instead of portraying the psychology of the embodied character, carries the critical
attitude of the actor towards the character. The movement also reflects a state of
social relations. Aigisthos’ fascist salute in the second sequence of the first episode
does not reflect his psychology but rather becomes a gesture that supports his
function as a social type. Pylades’ reaction to move away from the table functions
under the same principle. Similarly at a later point in the narrative, the violence of
the Right is presented through a gestural movement: firing into the air at the 1946
New Year’s Eve party. The Leftist youth responds by displaying his unarmed body
and then the group of Leftists leaves. The disarmament of the Left under the Treaty
of Varkiza had left the fascist paramilitaries free to act as they pleased. The
grotesque dance that follows where the male fascists are dancing in couples turns
into a disturbing image of sterility. The dance runs contrast to the dance of the
Leftists who dance in girl-boy couples. The costumes likewise become symbols of
social relations. The red scarf of the poet stands for the idea of revolution. The robe
of Clytemnestra becomes a representative of status. Electra puts it on with great
care after Orestes executes their mother and she becomes head of the troupe. In a
singular shot Electra is contrasted with her sister when the two meet outside their
rooms in the corridor of a hotel. Her sister Chrysothemis chooses her mother’s fur
coat instead. The fascist security forces are all wearing hats and suits, a grotesque
allusion both to the criminals and the police officers of film noir. We can claim that
the presence of the Gest is didactic. Brecht notes that the movements of an actor
trying to ward off biting dogs are mere acting gestures. If on the other hand the
actor is dressed in rags and the dogs are security dogs then his movement becomes
gestive. 18 It reveals the social relationships between people in a given period. The
act becomes other than itself. It is not a natural movement of self-protection in a
moment of danger. It denotes the presence of class division and oppression.

In yet another Brechtian echo, the film presents the breakdown of the world of
diegesis as a closed system. Angelopoulos introduces into the world of fiction
images that are themselves recreations of actual historical material, like the Treaty
of Varkiza sequence where the partisans hand over their weapons to the authorities

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one year before the outbreak of the official civil war. The staging of the sequence is
based on photographs taken during the event. Likewise the arrival of the German
troops in 1941 is presented with one static shot, where a group of German officers
is standing on a balcony with a Nazi flag hanging from the railings. The shot is then
superimposed by the original historical picture.

These are historical texts introduced as part of the fiction and so are the three shots
where the characters deliver their lines straight to the camera. The first sequence of
the fourth episode presents Agamemnon in direct confrontation with the lens
recounting the Minor Asia catastrophe. The camera remains immobile as if set for
an interview. Angelopoulos uses the same technique three times in the film. Electra
gives an account of the demonstrations of December 1944. By the time she presents
her account, the narrative has already proceeded to 1945. Electra has just been
raped. Her soliloquy breaks the action to stop identification with the character, as
Jordan points out 19 . The director does not give any space to the audience to
empathise with the heroine. Wearing her mother’s robe Electra stands in front of
the bridge where she has been abandoned by the fascists. Her monologue becomes
a testimony of a collective memory where English troops opened fire on peaceful
marchers. All three monologues, Agamemnon’s, Electra’s and Pylades’, belong to
real-life testimonies that the director weaves into the narrative. The narrative
becomes self-reflexive. Throughout the monologues the actors address the camera,
thus breaking the illusion of a closed imaginary world that is unfolding before the
eyes of the spectators. The gaze of the actor meets the spectator’s eye, canceling out
his/her position as master where the spectacle becomes an object. As the director
puts it:

These texts are narrations from three characters of the film that at
some point come out of the myth. They stand in front of the camera
and they are narrating as many Brechtian characters do. These texts
break up the film three times. The first (concerning the events of ’22)
as far as the course of the plot is concerned stands completely out of
the Myth; the second (Dekemvriana) moves in and out of the myth –

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 in other words not only do we see but we are also listening to a vocal
documentary; the third (about the exiles in Makronisos) is fully
inscribed in the myth. There is also the text of the ‘Varkiza Treaty’
and the text of the boy reading about the revolution of 1821 from the
school book. 20

The nature of all three narratives is didactic and their function works towards the
same aesthetic that was launched in Days of ’36, where major historical events do
not become the subject of dramatisation. As the demonstrations and the strikes were
reduced to stills and the political machinations were kept in the space off in that
film, so it is in the present film that the arrival of the Nazis turns into a tableau
vivant and the above mentioned events into personal recounting. This is a double
register of Brechtian distanciation where the spectator is prevented from
empathising with the action, but it is also an appropriation of the staging of ancient
drama where the audience witnesses a space where the event may have already
occurred or is taking place off stage. We can see this clearly during the sequence
that shows Agamemnon on stage reading a newspaper article that announces the
start of the Greco-Italian war in 1940. In a static long shot we see him onstage
dressed in the national costume of the foustanela. This costume is for the play but
now it also functions as an emblem for the call to national unity and support for the
troops who are already on their way to the front. The camera is placed in the
auditorium as if from the point of view of a spectator. The performance starts but is
soon interrupted by the sound of planes and then by the sound of explosions
coming from outside the theatre. The troupe leaves the stage and the audience
abandons the auditorium. We as spectators never see the audience. We only hear
them clapping and later on rushing about as they evacuate the building during the
bombings. What remains on screen is the empty stage. What we encounter is the
effect of the action on a particular space and not the action itself. The audio
montage replaces movement in the mise en scène that is in turn abandoned.

The last Brechtian feature that the film adopts, as Isabelle Jordan points out, is the
use of songs and music in the mise en scène, as bearers of the action. 21 In the film

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there is a total absence of non-diegetic music; the sound belongs exclusively to the
mise en scène. As part of his attempt towards a non-interventionist aesthetic, the
director avoids the use of a postproduction music score. Instead of underscoring the
image, the music becomes one of the elements that constitute the staging of the
mise en scène. This sense of non-interventionist realism is combined with a
Brechtian aesthetic where the music does not highlight the emotions of individual
characters nor does it function as a carpet for the unfolding of the action. Instead it
becomes the carrier of the drama.

Throughout the whole film there are clashes involving songs. Fascist songs are set
against the songs of the Left. Neutral music is also included in the opposition with
both sides adapting songs whose original lyrics are not political. Their juxtaposition
in a particular set of political events turns them into carriers of intense dramatic
resonance. In the 1946 New Year’s Eve sequence the fascists dance an old
fashioned waltz while the Leftists dance a boogie. In the café sequence in the
second episode the security forces parade outside the café singing a song popular
among Metaxas’ fascist youth movement. Aigisthos sings along from inside the
cafe. Pylades answers with a melancholic tune. Aigisthos becomes furious and
jumps onto his chair, singing loudly and moving his hands as if conducting an
orchestra. It should also be noted that the dichotomy here becomes gender specific.
The fascist song addresses the sun. In Greek, sun has a male gender (ο ήλιος) while
the Leftist tune is addressed to a woman. During the wedding of Chrysothemis and
the American soldier the American swing tune, Mona Lisa, is contrasted with a
traditional lament from Epirus Αχ, μωρή κοντούλα λεμονιά (oh my poor little lemon
tree). The American soldiers who explode into a jazz beat interrupt the traditional
song, which is sung by an old woman. A single human voice is contrasted with a
fusion of musical instruments; a live voice is set against a recorded song. The
traditional song is the same song used for the opening and ending of
Reconstruction. It is the same song that one of the political prisoners whistles right
before the attempted escape in Days of ’36. It makes its way into Thiassos and
draws a connecting line between the three films.

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The clash of songs reaches its peak at the 1946 New Year’s Eve sequence where we
witness two groups of people from opposing ideologies as they fire songs at each
other. During the sequence, the identity of each group is presented solely through
their movement, their costumes, and their use of singing. The sequence, which is
filmed again in one long take, starts with Elektra entering a decorated hall that
functions in terms of a ball room. At the back of the hall there is an orchestra on
stage. A female singer steps on stage and the attendants start applauding while the
orchestra starts playing. We see a man with a moustache in front of the stage as he
is trying to catch the rhythm but fails. With a slight grin on his face he starts
walking towards a table where a group of men is seated. The men in the group are
all wearing hats and dark suits. In the mean time, a few couples have already started
dancing. One of the men with the hats gets up and pulls a girl away from her
partner while they dance. The partner is afraid to react and walks away slowly.
While the dance continues, we see a mixed group of girls and boys entering the hall
and dancing merrily. The man with the hat goes back to his group and whispers
something in the ear of the man with the moustache, who seems to be the leader of
the group. The latter gets up angrily as if ready to explode and keeps staring at the
group that has just walked in and is now occupying a table right next to the stage. A
waiter runs towards a bald man who seems to be the owner of the hall and tells him
something that we as viewers cannot hear. The bald man signals the orchestra to
stop and then approaches the newly arrived group. The dance space is now empty.
The bald man whispers something to a member of the newly arrived group who
then answers back with a reassuring smile. The bald man gives a signal to the
orchestra to keep playing. But now no one gets up to dance.

The camera that had up to that moment followed the action starts receding towards
the exit opposite the stage which is now framed from a right diagonal. While
performing this recessional movement the camera brings into full view the two
groups with the empty dance hall in the middle. At the back of the dance space is
the orchestra. The camera reaches a standstill and now we see the two groups
occupying the two edges of the frame. The men in dark costumes are in the
foreground to the left while the newly arrived group is further away into the

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background to the right. The man with the moustache gets up, walks in the middle
of the empty space, and, raising his hand, orders the orchestra to stop. His group
then starts singing a chorus line from a fascist song that is in favour of the King. As
soon as they finish, the young man who had been talking to the owner gets up from
the other table and walks towards the man with the moustache. The young man
starts singing a song against the British Occupying forces and in favour of
democracy. His group then sings along with him. What follows is an exchange of
songs with political content that the groups keep firing at each other. Suddenly, a
girl from the newly arrived group gets up on stage and starts singing a song whose
lyrics are ridiculing the British forces and General Scobie in particular. The
orchestra bursts into a rhythmical boogie and her group takes over the dance hall as
they start dancing in frenzy.

The momentary victory of the Left in the singing ‘contest’ is challenged with the
use of a firearm. The man with the moustache fires a shot in the air thus
interrupting the dance. One of the Leftist youths replies by opening the inside of his
jacket to reveal that he is unarmed. His movement does not tell us anything about
his character. Yet again the movement becomes other than itself: it is a comment on
the Varkiza Treaty that was signed between the Left and the Right in 1945. The
Treaty ordered the disarmament of the Left after the end of the Resistance and after
the Left had lost the Battle of Athens in 1944. The main forces of the Left who
mainly formed the liberating army of the Resistance were forced to disarm and in
their place the security forces, aided by criminals and ex-Nazi collaborators, were
given arms and carte blanche. The sequence ends with the Leftists having walked
away and the fascists singing and dancing between themselves to the rhythm of a
royalist song in the middle of an empty dance hall.

Time

The film starts with the introduction of a narrator who announces the start of the
rural play Golfo. A cut introduces the troupe arriving at the city of Aigio in 1952.

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The voiceover reports that the year is 1952 and that the troupe has been to this city
before but the lineup is different now. As the actors move about in the streets of
Aigio we see them in a long diagonal shot as they come down the main street
moving from the right side of the frame at the back towards the foreground to the
left. A voice from a megaphone is heard offscreen urging the people to vote for
General Papagos. It is the first elections after the civil war when the Right
established its power behind the mask of a democratically elected government. The
Communist Party had already been declared illegal and the elections took place in
the face of terrorism on behalf of the Right, who defrauded the electorate to gain
absolute power. The street is full of banners supporting General Papagos. The
troupe is walking down the main street when a van going the opposite way passes
them. It is from the van that the amplified voice comes. The troupe then turns into a
small alley. The camera stays on the street, and when the troupe returns onto the
main street the composition of the group is different. Some of the members are
different and the rest look younger. The voice that came from the van cannot be
heard anymore and the banners are not visible. A cut introduces Pylades from
behind and then follows the rest of the group as they move to the central square and
into a café. At the square a man on a bike is announcing a public speech by General
Metaxas that will take place some time later during the day. This is the first
timelapse that occurs within the shot. The narrative has gone back to 1939.

As I have already noted the narrative moves back and forth from 1939 to 1952. The
film has an episodic structure that follows a linear chronological order until a time
shift occurs to 1952. From 1952 there is a return to the past but always at a later
point in time from when the shift originally occurred. Furthermore the film adopts a
compression of time through the use of the sequence shot. The demonstrations for
national unity are compressed into one sequence together with the December
Demonstrations. Similarly the Battle of Athens is represented in one sequence shot.
The events that follow the opening sequence of the film that takes us back to 1939
are all set in the same period until Pylades is arrested. Then the narrative moves
forward to the night of the 28th of October 1940, which is the day when Metaxas
refused to surrender to the call of the Italian Fascists and the Greco-Italian war

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erupted. Agamemnon then recounts the Minor Asia catastrophe of 1922 to camera.
The chronological linearity is retained until the German invasion, which is
represented by a still frame. The next shot reveals Electra staring out of a window
in a hotel. Pylades comes into the room. They go out. Together with the rest of the
group they move from the bay to the city. Pictures of General Papagos are hanging
on the street walls. The megaphone we heard in the opening sequence is heard from
offscreen. We as viewers realise that the narrative has moved back to 1952. The
camera then follows the van until it vanishes off the far right of the screen. After a
pause a black Mercedes makes its way onto the screen from the same point that the
van vanished towards. When it comes closer to the panning camera its Nazi
markings are visible. The camera follows the car as it passes in front of the street
that the troupe went up. The pictures of Papagos along with the pamphlets that were
thrown from the van have disappeared. Instead there is a sign which reads “Halt!
Kontrolle” and a guard dressed in Nazi uniform holding a machine gun. The time is
winter 1942.

The thirteenth episode consists of two long takes. In the second take the fascist
security forces are walking down an empty street after they have established their
dominance over the Leftist youths. The year is still 1946. The camera records their
military march until they reach a group of people who are listening to the speech by
General Papagos. The narrative has moved to 1952. A cut then takes the narrative
to 1949. From that point the narrative proceeds in the form of episodes each set in a
particular time and space towards 1952 in order to then make the final retreat back
to 1939.

In Days of ’36 the long take was a tool used to organise the profilmic space into a
representational field based on a liturgical arrangement of the mise en scène that
incorporated a theory of internal montage, be it audio or visual. Each long take
would maintain chronological and spatial uniformity. In Thiassos, as demonstrated
above, the long take expands into something else. The sequence shot incorporates a
time shift within a concrete space. We can claim then that the first sequence does
not record the movement of the travelling players into the streets of Aigio. It

99
records time as the players bring the past into the present. 1939 co-exists with 1952
and with 1975, which is the year of the film’s release. Different points in time are
represented by different points on the street, and the camera simply needs to track
to a different part of the street to show that the characters have moved back or
forwards in time. In 1952 the Right established its victory. In 1939 Greece was
under the rule of a dictatorship, as it was at the time when the director started
shooting the film. The film starts and ends with an identical shot. The second long
take of the thirteenth episode includes the third year of the civil war but it also
implies the period until 1975. The fascist security forces are marching down the
street singing songs in favour of the king and the army, cursing the communists as
traitors who are to be wiped out. The streets are empty. The houses have their doors
and windows closed. The fascists are free to roam all the way to their so-called
democratic establishment in 1952. It is as if the film echoes Benjamin’s dictum
that:

History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogeneous, empty

time, but time filled by the presence of the now [Zeitgeist]… 22

This leap into the past in the Travelling Players signifies the director’s leap into the
past of which he becomes a collector of images. The movement of the camera
inscribes the subjective presence of the storyteller. The shifts in time render an
open dialogue with history whose imprint remains in the present. Through the
camera’s movement, the long take becomes a passage of time that incorporates this
presence. The static shots become history as lived experience (the testimonies
before the camera) and signifiers of textual interplay. When Orestes kills Aigisthos
he does it onstage as the character of Tassos in the play Golfo, who comes on
‘frame’ to kill Zissis, who is the obstacle to his love affair with Golfo. Orestes kills
Aigisthos; Tassos kills Zissis. The revolutionary kills the informer. One text blends
into the other in a manner in which the search for the original as the cause for the
other is lost. It is more that one is a supplement for the other. The performance
ceases to be an entertaining break from real life. It turns into an active force in the
shape of events. In a similar way, historical events are staged as theatre

100
performances in the film, such as the Battle of Athens or the December ’44
demonstrations. Angelopoulos breaks down the dichotomy between life and
spectacle. The theatre performance becomes yet another image which is as real as
the Battle of Athens. During Orestes’ burial at the end of the civil war that saw the
defeat of the Left, the remaining members of the troupe break into a round of
applause as if equating a life with a performance.

Eirini Stathi points out that time in the film works under the principle of anamnesis
(memory). 23 That is, the sequence shot incorporates a time shift in a continuous
space, since its time is not an objective homogenous time but a time of recollection
which shifts from one plane to the next. Yet we should add that this is not a
subjective rendering of associative memory. There is a strong dialectic between two
very specific historical moments that are either linked or contrasted. The function
of the myth and traditional rituals that are incorporated into the narrative might be
of a synchronic nature but the time lapse that occurs within one take always
involves two distinct historical times. The camera attains an impersonal subjectivity
that contrasts two moments in time in order for the one to shed light on the truth of
the other. As Sergio Arreco points out:

Angelopoulos, through the examination of the sacrilegious of the now

(History), with the cover up and the filter of a holy past, implies this
other that is lacking in myth, which today answers to a familiar name:
Revolution, Class struggle. 24

Death?

In The Storyteller, Benjamin says that death is the sanction of everything that the
storyteller can tell. We can say that death makes a twofold entrance into the film.
The first is through the content and the second lies in the use of colour and the
Brechtian distanciation device, achieved by making the actors freeze.

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The prevalent colours of the film are brown and yellow as if the director were using
the shades which time inscribes on an old photo. For example, the director
maintained the yellow stains caused by moisture on the neoclassical houses that
were refurbished for the requirements of the film as a sign of abandonment and
neglect. In its use of colour, the film is very similar to Days of ’36. However, the
strong sunlight of that film now makes way for the more familiar grey shades of a
winter landscape that give a strong sense of detachment to the image. As Eirini
Stathi points out, the use of colour in Thiassos also has strong affinities with the
colours used in the paintings of Yiannis Tsarouhis. 25 In the 1944 café sequence
where the troupe is advertising its show outside the café, the framing and the
arrangement of the front entrance of the café is an appropriation of Tsarouhis’
painting The Neon Café (1966). We could argue that the use of colour functions
according to the same principle that characterises the time shifts within the
sequence shot. Angelopoulos uses colour not for the objective rendering of the past
but rather to give an image of what a collective memory has inscribed as the
permeating colour of the era. The allusion to photographs and paintings becomes an
evident marker of their function in the creation of a recollection image.

When Electra is kidnapped by a group of fascists we as viewers never see the act
take place. In an interior static shot that frames the exit of a hotel and stairs leading
upstairs, we witness the group making its way into the hotel and then going up the
stairs. We are then left staring at the empty hallway while the act takes place off
screen. The derelict walls and the dampness in the hallway become an image of
death, one that anticipates another interior shot of a similarly empty damp room at a
later point in the narrative, when Electra goes to see her brother’s body in prison,
having been informed of his execution. She finds him placed on a table in the
middle of an empty basement room.

There are more images that carry the same weight of mortality. The narrative of the
Asia Minor catastrophe, the execution of Agamemnon, the tortures and executions
of the Leftist rebels, the demonstrations of December ’45 and Chrisothemi’s
marriage to the American soldier contrast with the traditional lament that seems to

102
permeate through the whole film. However, this is not a lament of despair: it carries
with it a force of resistance that is passed on to Chrisothemi’s young son who walks
off enraged during the grotesque marriage. The white cloth that drags between his
legs becomes somehow a signifier for the Trilogy of Silence of the 1980s where the
generation of little Orestes, including the director himself, will face a disorienting
present.

A different image of death comes through the mise en scène when the camera
becomes still and the fixed frame concentrates on the stillness of the actors after
they have performed a ritualistic movement. It is here that the cinematic image
delivers an image of time as rupture, the Barthesian punctum, an image that escapes
the intentional message of the director. Punctum and dictum are the two terms
Barthes saw as forming the nature of photography. The dictum is the intentional
message of the picture and the punctum is an “element which rises from the scene,
shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me.” 26 The punctum is presented as
something that is not intentional in the picture, a detail that will strike the viewer
and make him/her invest a personal reading or emotion in the image. The function
of the punctum expands from this personal viewing to a general rupture of
delivering a time both present and absent. Unlike the cinematic image, which
animates the past into an eternal present through movement, the stillness of the
picture creates a disorienting feeling of the uncanny. The stillness of the image
fixes time, yet the lifelike resemblance of the object brings it to the eyes as an
animated death. The time of the photograph seems to be concentrated in the ‘it has
been’. The object of the gaze had objectively stood before the lens at a moment in
time which has now passed. What the viewer perceives in the now is this fixing of
time. The photograph fixes something permanently which is now different or dead.
This is not an image of mental space which recollection can delve into. The
photograph delivers time as rupture. It is a remainder of mortality, of the viewer’s
mortality. Just as the object that stood before the lens is no more, so too will I one
day be no more. 27 Melancholia seems to be the permeating aspect of photography
and Angelopoulos reaches something very close to the quality of the still frame.
The punctum here has nothing to do with an accidental event that the camera might

103
capture in a natural setting. There is hardly anything accidental in the perfectly
orchestrated mise en scène of Thiassos. The punctum is the piercing of the past that
is irretrievable and reminds us of our mortality. This absence comes to the
foreground in moments such as when the actors freeze in the fixed frame of the
Battle of Athens or when the action stops when the troupe is performing for the
British soldiers. We could argue that the Brechtian distanciation becomes a similar
point of rupture that carries with it the melancholia of history.

The sequence of the Battle of Athens delivers the past into the present but the
stylisation of the movement delivers an image of death. The sequence is not an
imitation of the event. It is an orchestration that comes anterior to the event. If
cinema delivers an image of life through its ability to render movement, it is as if
the stylisation of movement delivers a rupture in life. If cinema inherently recreates
movement and makes us forget that the action is no longer there in order to identify
with the life unfolding on the screen then the stylisation of movement cannot but
break with this principle. In the Battle of Athens sequence, we see the groups
colliding but we are not drawn into the action. The stylisation of the movement
functions towards a distanciating effect. Instead of recreating the event in a lifelike
manner, the sequence maintains its historical distance from the actual event. The
dictum then would be that the sequence translates the event into a cinematic
language. It is a translation that envelops the event in order to reach the essence of
the event and simultaneously inscribe its own ideology. Yet this break in the flow
of natural life becomes simultaneously an arrow of death. The fixed frame and the
stillness that the actors reach even though only momentary, renders the same sense
of mortality Barthes saw in the photograph. It is as if the freezing, apart from
becoming a signifier of rupture in a homogenous historical flow, also runs counter
to the inherent nature of the film, which is movement. If movement gives the
illusion of life then a freezing of movement breaks away to deliver an image of
time reaching a standstill. Abrupt violent sounds like that of a hand grenade
exploding or that of a gunshot from offscreen are usually used to break the moment
and re-inscribe movement and time into the image. It is as if the still frame of the
Battle of Athens is changed into a split image. The intentional critical distanciation

104
from the action also gives the image of an event that has passed and is no more.
Melancholia and rebellion function simultaneously.

We can sense the same rupture in Agamemnon’s phrase ‘I say’ (Λέω) during his
account of the Minor Asia catastrophe. The line signifies the summoning of his
enunciating power in order to answer back to the royalists every time he is insulted.
It is as if this is also a line of death absorbing the motion of the image and the
mental spaces generated through the personal narrative. The speech type of
Agamemnon, so familiar yet so distant, delivers a social milieu in the form of a ruin
through the punctuation of the particular phrase. Stratos Pahis, who plays
Agamemnon, had a theatrical background. However, instead of delivering the
character’s speech in the style of a dramatic monologue, which would have
elevated the tone of the speech, he speaks in a dialect that was already obsolete at
the time of the film’s production. The dialect is that of the working class of the
1930s. Again the monologue is not yet another element in a faithful recreation of an
era. It is not an exorcising of death through a personal narrative to make sense of a
catastrophe. It is the marking of death through punctuating what is no more. Finally
this presence of an absent past is there both in the opening and final shot of the film
where the troupe arrives in Aigio. The troupe is shot in a static take as they
assemble and then stand still before the lens. As the director himself puts it, he
chose to end the film with the original lineup of the troupe. Those who are dead
stand among those who have remained. It is as if this was a family portrait. 28 It is as
if we who have been following the life of the troupe over a diegetic timespan of
twelve years and for more than four hours of screen time now encounter an image
from an irretrievable past. The preclusion of empathy throughout the film does not
rule out the emotions we might feel for the characters. The image of the troupe
arriving at Aigio in 1939 and then becoming still before the lens becomes a
reminder of mortality. It is this mortality that unites us with them.

105
Conclusion

With Thiassos, Angelopoulos gives us a film of epic proportions. He succeeds in

directing a film whose subject matter is a direct confrontation with the events that
shook modern Greece as an entity during and after the end of the Second World
War. Like a modern storyteller he blends the image of a collective memory that
clearly belongs to the Left with his own subjective filter. Thiassos is a film that is
built on the function of the sequence shot whose autonomous presence brings out a
narrative based on dialectics. The long take is established as the main tool of the
narrative and allows the director to form a perfectly calculated cinematic staging. It
is a staging where the time of the shot identifies with the duration of an action that
appears in its complete process until reaching completion.

This inscription of real time in the diegetic world also includes the spectator’s time
for the perception of the image. The camera is used as a recorder of movement that
is in turn defamiliarised, breaking away with the conventions of naturalism. The
actor is used as a vehicle for ideas and so are his/her movements. The Atreides do
not exist on a psychological level. They carry the ideological battle that
characterised modern Greek history. This contrast is presented graphically in the
form of the film through the collision of human figures identified through their
costumes, their gestures and the songs they fire at each other. This dialectic in the
mise en scène can be read as a montage within the shot where the settings, the
costumes, the choreography of groups and the gestures of the actors, far from
functioning as mere elements for a lifelike recreation of the past, instead shape the
meaning of the narrative. Through the use of offscreen space, the camera allows a
time montage that occurs within the confinements of the same, shot thus underlying
the ever-present nature of history. It is a history that functions in terms of a
collective memory.

Finally, since the narrative is presented as memory that brings everything to a

present reconstruction, Thiassos must be an elegiac film. History is claimed on
behalf of the Left but not in order to celebrate the foundation of a new revolution.

106
The cyclical structure of the narrative is very explicit. The final shot, which is
identical to the first shot of the film after the introduction of the old man, places the
travelling players in 1939. The revolution is far from being achieved but cinema
has won a film that spurs the spectator to get involved not only with life but also
with death.

1
Κωνσταντίνος Θέμελης, Θόδωρος Αγγελόπουλος-Το Παρελθόν ως Ιστορία, το Μέλλον ως Φόρμα,
Ύψιλον/Βιβλία, Αθήνα, 1998, pp. 124-126.
2
Ibid. p. 124.
3
Interview with the author, unpublished, June 2005.
4
For a more detailed account of the 16th Greek Film Festival see the archive page of the Thessaloniki
Film Festival website: [Link]
5
Walter Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller - Reflections on the Work of Nikolai Leskov’ in Illuminations,
Fontana Press, Great Britain, p. 92.
6
Γιάννης Κ. Κορδάτος, Προλεγόμενα στο Ομηρικό Ζήτημα (Μέρος Τρίτο),
[Link]
7
Γιάννης Κ. Κορδάτος, Προλεγόμενα στο Ομηρικό Ζήτημα (Μέρος Τρίτο),
[Link]
8
Thodoros Angelopoulos in an interview with Mixalis Dimopoulos and Frida Liapa in Θόδωρος
Αγγελόπουλος,, ed. Ειρήνη Στάθη, Φεστιβάλ Κινηματογράφου Θεσσαλονίκης - Εκδόσεις
Καστανιώτη, Αθήνα , 2000, trns. by E.M., p. 183.
9
Slavoj Žižek, The Fright of Real Tears: Krzysztof Kiesłowski: Between Theory and Post-Theory, BFI
publishing, London, 2001 pp. 50-51.
10
Gilberto Perez, The Material Ghost, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London,
1998, p. 169.
11
Lino Micciché, ‘Ο Αισθητικός Υλισμός του Αγγελόπουλου’ in Θόδωρος Αγγελόπουλος,, ed. Ειρήνη
Στάθη, Φεστιβάλ Κινηματογράφου Θεσσαλονίκης - Εκδόσεις Καστανιώτη, Αθήνα, 2000, p.138.
12
Ειρήνη Στάθη, Χώρος και Χρόνος στο Κινηματογράφο του Θόδωρου Αγγελόπουλου, Αιγόκερως,
Αθήνα, 1999, p.123.
13
Gilberto Perez, ibid, p.169.
14
For Sergei Eisenstein cinema has to influence the audience in a desired direction. The film has to
attract the spectator’s attention through a chain of stimuli that will in turn produce certain emotional
shocks in the spectator for him/her to perceive the ideological aspect of what is being shown. As
discussed in the Days of ’36 the juxtaposition of two images from a different spatiotemporal situation
can produce an abstract meaning which lies in neither of the images if viewed in isolation. The
meaning is produced from their confrontation which is more that often agitating. See my chapter on
Days of ’36 p. 69-70. See also Sergei Eisenstein, ‘The Montage of Attractions’ in Eisenstein Writings
Volume 1 1922-34, BFI Publishing / Indiana University Press, London Bloomington and Indianapolis,
1988, p. 34. See also Jacques Aumont, Montage Eisenstein, BFI Publishing Indiana University Press,
London Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1979, pp. 44-47.
15
See Bertolt Brecht, ‘The Modern Theatre is the Epic Theatre’ in Brecht on Theatre: the
Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. by John Willet, Methuen Drama, 1978, pp. 33-42.
16
Many critics agree that Angelopoulos incorporates Brechtian techniques in this film. Most
importantly, Angelopoulos has admitted that this was a conscious attempt. See Isabelle Jordan, Για
ένα Επικό Κινηματογράφο in Θόδωρος Αγγελόπουλος, ed. Ειρήνη Στάθη, Φεστιβάλ Κινηματογράφου
Θεσσαλονίκης - Εκδόσεις Καστανιώτη, Αθήνα, 2000, p. 232 -238. See also Angelopoulos’ interview
with Michel Dimopoulos and Frida Liappa featured in the same volume pp.181-187 as well as Πέτρος
Μάρκαρης, ‘Ιστορία και Ιστορική Απόσταση-Οι Μπρεχτικές Αναφορές στο έργο του Αγγελόπουλου’
in the periodical διαβάζω, τεύχος 457, 2004, pp. 79 – 83. In a personal interview, Angelopoulos noted

107
that it is only in the Travelling Players that he consciously attempted to incorporate the theories of
Brecht. He insisted that there are no alienation techniques in any other of his films.
17
Nikos Kolovos also notes that the sequence is a reconstruction, a metonymy of the Battle of Athens.
See Νίκος Κολοβός, Θόδωρος Αγγελόπουλος, Αιγόκερως, 1990, p. 91.
18
Bertolt Brecht, ‘On Gestic Music’ in Brecht on Theatre: the Development of an Aesthetic, ibid., p.
104.
19
Isabelle Jordan, ‘Για ένα Επικό Κινηματογράφο’ in Θόδωρος Αγγελόπουλος, ed. Ειρήνη Στάθη,
Φεστιβάλ Κινηματογράφου Θεσσαλονίκης - Εκδόσεις Καστανιώτη, Αθήνα, 2000, p. 237.
20
Theo Angelopoulos in an interview with Mixalis Dimopoulos and Frida Liapa in Θόδωρος
Αγγελόπουλος,, ed. Ειρήνη Στάθη, Φεστιβάλ Κινηματογράφου Θεσσαλονίκης - Εκδόσεις
Καστανιώτη, Αθήνα, 2000, trns. by E.M., p. 182-183.
21
Isabelle Jordan, ‘Για ένα Επικό Κινηματογράφο’ in Θόδωρος Αγγελόπουλος, ed. Ειρήνη Στάθη,
Φεστιβάλ Κινηματογράφου Θεσσαλονίκης - Εκδόσεις Καστανιώτη, Αθήνα, 2000, p. 238.
22
Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Illuminations, Fontana Press, 1992, pp
252-253.
23
Ειρήνη Στάθη, Χώρος και Χρόνος στο Κινηματογράφο του Θόδωρου Αγγελόπουλου , ibid, p. 175.
24
Sergio Arrecco, Θόδωρος Αγγελόπουλος, Εκδόσεις Ηράκλειτος, Αθήνα, 1985, p. 104
25
Ειρήνη Στάθη, Χώρος και Χρόνος στο Κινηματογράφο του Θόδωρου Αγγελόπουλου, ibid., pp. 101-
103.
26
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida - Reflections on Photography, Vintage Books, London, (1981)
2000, p.26.
27
See Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida-Reflections on Photography, ibid. pp. 94-99.
28
Theo Angelopoulos in an interview with the author, unpublished, June 2005.

108
 THE HUNTERS / ΟΙ ΚΥΝΗΓΟΙ

During an expedition to the mountainous areas of northern Greece, a group of

hunters discover a frozen body in the midst of a snowy landscape. The time is New
Year’s Eve 1976 and the body is that of a rebel partisan from the Civil War, which
ended in 1949. The corpse is in perfect condition; moreover, the blood from his
wound is still fresh. The hunters take the body back to the hotel where they are
staying and place it on a large table in the middle of what seems to be the main
dance hall. It becomes apparent that the body strikes every single member of the
group with a sense of great discomfort if not terror.

The members of this group are not ordinary everyday individuals. Each one, from a
different perspective, represents the New Social Order that emerged in Greece after
the Civil War. The haunting presence of the body launches the protagonists on a
journey into the past, examining the major social and political events that took place
from the end of the Civil War until the film’s narrated present.

By the time The Hunters was released in 1977, the sense of euphoria that had
inspired Greek filmmakers after the end of the junta in 1975 seemed to have faded
away. The fall of the junta saw the return of Konstantinos Karamanlis, president of
the postwar rightwing faction Ε.Ρ.Ε. (National Radical Union) and Prime Minister
for the second half of the fifties until 1963. Karamanlis had taken over as Prime
Minister after the sudden death of General Papagos in 1955 and his name has been
associated with the country’s entry into the European Economic Community in 1961,
the precursor of today’s European Union. His efforts towards modernisation came
together with a heavy anti-Communist agenda, and he was strongly accused by all
the leftwing parties of winning the 1961 elections through fraud.

Karamanlis left the country in 1963, after losing the elections to Georgios
Papandreou, head of the Ένωσις Κέντρου (Centrist Union). During his time as Prime

109
Minister, any leftwing organisation faced severe persecution; his drive towards
industrialisation and modernisation came against the backdrop of a police state,
where divisions from the Civil War loomed over public life. Needless to say, his
return in 1974 – followed by his role as ethnarhis (leader of the nation) and guarantor
of democracy, appointed by the most conservative forces in Greece – could only
appear as a paradox to those on the Left.

Two years after the Thessaloniki Greek Film Festival of 1975, where The Travelling
Players met with rapturous acclaim and the audience hailed the event as ‘the first
film festival of the people’, the Greek film world was plunged into chaos. The
Ministry of Industry decided to appoint a council for the newly formed Greek Film
Centre (the main funding body for Greek cinema) which did not include a single film
director or critic. This was followed by the exclusion of all of the labour unions
relating to cinema from the committee of the Thessaloniki Festival. The filmmakers
reacted by withdrawing their films from the official programme and organising their
own ‘anti-festival’, which featured seven films including The Hunters. 1 The rupture
between the filmmakers of the New Greek Cinema and the State denotes yet again
the tension between an art-house cinema (where the director and the unions would be
in control of the film) and a commercially oriented cinema where the producer would
have absolute control. As Angelopoulos stated in an interview, extracts of which are
published in Giannis Soldatos’ History of Greek Cinema:

I believe that the people who started making films in the 70s can do
both [commercially oriented and art house films]. The difference is that
we have reached a point of extreme antithesis….there is no common
ground. There is no film that we can meet with the existing
producers…We do not have films like Ettore Scola’s A Special Day
(Una Giornata Particolare) which is beautiful but definitely a
commercial film. We only have the two extremes: very demanding
works vs. pure entertainment. 2

110
The Hunters was produced by Nikos Angelopoulos, the director’s brother, yet it was
not the first film where he enjoyed complete autonomy. The previous two films,
funded by Giorgos Papalios, were also made under the auteur principle. The only real
problem was for the production to meet the financial demands of the project, the
control of which was in the hands of the director. Papalios refused to produce The
Hunters because he was afraid of the political implications involved in producing yet
another film by Angelopoulos and the negative impact it would entail for him as a
businessman. It should be noted that the government of Konstantinos Karamanlis
attempted once again to sabotage the film’s entry to the Cannes Film Festival by
refusing to submit the film as the country’s official candidate. Yet the film was
included in the programme after the new director of the Festival, Gilles Jacob, sent a
personal invitation to Angelopoulos. 3 The Hunters also won the prize for Best Film
at the Thessaloniki Anti-Film Festival of 1977.

Closing the circle

The Hunters closes the Trilogy of History in the most oblique manner. Angelopoulos’
plunge into recent Greek history takes the form of a grotesque ballet incorporating
representative members of the ruling bourgeoisie that emerged after the end of the
Greek Civil War in 1949. The Hunters is one of the most demanding films in the
director’s output. It is not only its three-hour length that makes it difficult for an
unwary viewer, nor even the consecutive use of long takes and sequence shots –
which follow one another seamlessly, but with no sense of fulfilled action or
mounting suspense. What makes it a very difficult film to watch – and here we
should note its affinities with Days of ’36 – is that Angelopoulos delivers a perfectly
orchestrated mise-en-scene that leaves the spectator hanging in thin air.

In The Hunters there is no breathing space. This is not because the spectator does not
have the time to take his eyes off the screen due to fast editing and spectacular visual
effects. Neither is it because there are so many narrative cues that the slightest
distraction would leave the audience with the sense of having missed the plot, as in a

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classical film noir like Howard Hawks’ 1946 The Big Sleep (where keeping track of
who is who and what they are doing is like solving a riddle) or in a film like Oliver
Stone’s 1991 JFK (where the rapid editing creates an elusive narrative that matches
the chaotic mass of information surrounding the President’s murder). In the above-
mentioned examples, the audience anchors its point of view to a main character who
becomes the agent for the development of the plot. In The Hunters, the spectator is
left hanging in thin air because there is no ground to hold onto, no leading agent or
group with whom the audience can identify.

Although The Travelling Players abstains from the use of psychology in the
portrayal of individuals, emphasising instead their social identity and their function
in terms of group action, the narrative provides space for an audience to feel for the
members of the troupe. Modern Greek history is presented as a gigantic clash
between two forces, the Right and the Left, where the individual is inevitably drawn
to one side or the other, but the film also marks the space of everyday individuals
caught up in the middle. The narrative holds a separate point of view, yet we are also
made to see the unfolding of events through the point of view of various members of
the troupe and, mostly, through the perspective of Electra. Furthermore, the film
naturally leans towards the Left since it portrays a wider democratic tendency in
Greek society, a tendency that was violently suppressed by the Royalists and the
Fascists (aided by the British army) after liberation from the Nazis in 1944.

In The Hunters, Angelopoulos stages a trial for the members of the hunting party.
We as spectators, however, are deprived not only of the luxury of empathising with
any of the characters, but also of having any emotional response towards a human
agent. For three hours, we are made to witness a fake trial where each member
becomes a vehicle for a flashback into recent Greek history. There is absolutely
nobody in the film for an audience to identify with as an agent for redemption – apart
from, possibly, the corpse.

After the hunters bring the frozen body back to the hotel and notify the police, an
investigation starts where each member narrates his involvement in the incident. The

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investigation takes place within the main hall of the hotel. The group of hunters,
together with their wives, are sitting in the middle of the room. The corpse is placed
on a large rectangular table and hidden behind a curtained alcove on one side of the
room. Above the curtain, there is a sign saying ‘Happy 1977’. Throughout the film,
the corpse is repeatedly brought into the room only to be placed behind the curtain
again. When the investigation starts, the chief officer calls each member of the group
by name and occupation. Yet he abstains from asking a single question. His only
remark comes from reading out the records of the case at the very beginning of the
interrogation, where he announces the place where the body was found: beside the
ruins of ancient Tymphaia on the sides of Mount Tomaros. For the viewer who is
acquainted with the director’s previous work, this is an obvious allusion. Beside the
ruins of ancient Tymphaia lies the village in Reconstruction.

As in the first film of Angelopoulos, the police are staging a standard cross-
examination. In Reconstruction, the police determinedly use a bureaucratic
examination to determine which of the couple is guilty of the crime. By finally
assigning guilt to the murderous wife, they close the case in legal terms yet fail either
to explain the irrationality of the act or to address the oppressive patriarchy of the
small village, which is withering away in the face of growing internal migration.
Similarly, in The Hunters the staging of a cross- examination is not done to produce
any results. As we see when the police arrive, the Chief Inspector (working hand-in-
glove with the publisher) wants to round up the usual suspects, find someone guilty
of the crime and close the case. Likewise, there is an order to limit access to the
press. There is a further historical allusion that the non-Greek viewer will not grasp.
During the Civil War, Mount Tomaros was a stronghold for leftwing partisans. As
we see in the film, the hotel that the hunters are staying in once served as a partisan
headquarters.

As soon as the group of hunters discovers the body in the snow, the industrialist
exclaims: “This story ended in ’49. Damn. I do not understand.” Right before the
police arrive, and after the group has placed the dead partisan on a table in the main
hallway of the hotel, the publisher remarks that “the last Communist partisans were

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either killed or forced to cross the borders into the countries of the Soviet Bloc at the
end of ’49. Everybody knows that. The fact that he is here before us is a historical
mistake.” Immediately, one realises that the film does not evolve on a realistic plane.
Rather, it evokes a closed universe in and around the hotel; the director builds an
allegorical narrative that aims to make visible what the members of the hunting party
want to suppress. The presence of the corpse becomes a haunting presence. As
Isabelle Jordan points out, the body marks the return of a past that the ruling
bourgeoisie is blotting out on their way to modernity. 4

This return of the repressed marks the narrative of the film and informs its time
transitions, where we see each member revisiting his/her own past in a time frame
that starts as early as 1949 and extends until the film’s narrated present. Before
analysing the frame of these time transitions in detail, we should examine the make-
up of the hunting party as it appears in the film. As Sergio Arreco has noted, in both
The Hunters and Days of ’36, what we really see is a disjointed ballet rather than
unified choral ensembles as in the films of Miklós Jancsó, which bear many
resemblances to those of Angelopoulos in terms of cinematic staging and in the way
both directors are interested in the movement of groups of people rather than the fate
of individual heroes. 5 The expression cinematic staging is used by David Bordwell,
who also notes the similarities between Jancsó and Angelopoulos in the way they
both concentrate on group action within the mise-en-scene and both deal with the
emergent grand narratives of their nations. For Bordwell, both directors create a
sense of distance from the evolving action, thus generating space for the viewer to
contemplate the events that happen on screen. 6

We should note however that, although both directors concentrate on the movement
of social groups and abstain from individual narratives, they show a radically
different perspective on that movement. Janscó's choreographed groups, as we see in
The Red and the White (1967) or Electra, My Love (1975), are the materialisation of
the dialectic between Master and Slave. The mise en scène becomes a circular field
where one group succeeds the other in a game of mastery and oppression. In
Angelopoulos, we do not see the presence of such large orchestrated choruses.

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Furthermore, Angelopoulos does not see the same structure that Jancsó sees in the
history of his country. The hunters appear to be isolated, lacking the voice and the
support of the society they claim to represent.

In Days of ’36, we see the representatives of the state failing to reach a conclusion as
they confer about what to do with a prisoner who has taken a politician hostage. At
times they reach a standstill and the absurdity of their position is made clear.
Angelopoulos has referred to the film as a black comedy. 7 It is precisely this element
of parody that distances his cinema from that of Jancsó. In Jancsó’s films, we would
never see a figure like the Greek politician walking along the beach with a rifle on
his shoulder as if he were going to hunt birds.

It is really the same type of social persona that is multiplied sevenfold in The
Hunters. The hunting party is not one of grandiose power. They lack the uniformity
of a chorus; rather, they resemble figures in a minimalist puppet play. Angelopoulos
refuses to endow them with either a humanist subjectivity (where the subject
becomes an agent that controls history) or with a collective consciousness (which
acts upon and reflects a particular ideology). The hunters, as a group, lack any real
agenda other than the drive to acquire power. They are the embodiments of the
Right, and the way in which it rose to power in Greece. As Vassilis Rafailidis points
out, the Right in Greece had only one ideology: to preserve the power and increase
the wealth of its members. 8 The industrialist, the hotel owner, the politician, the civil
engineer, the military officer, the publisher and their wives comprise a dislocated
ballet situated in a hotel at the sides of a lake.

Let us observe how this plunge into the past takes place in the current film, and how
it differs from the time transitions in The Travelling Players. The whole narrative of
the film evolves in a single pattern. Each member of the group revisits his/her past,
which accounts for the evolution of a whole society in time. Each member is a type
rather than a psychological character. After the group of hunters gathers around the
corpse for the second time – when the publisher exclaims that this is a historical
mistake – the head of the local authorities decides to go into town to receive

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authorisation on how to deal with the case. The sequence cuts to a shot of the pier,
where we see the local policemen boarding a boat that will presumably take them to
the city. On the pier, the group of hunters is framed from behind at an almost vertical
angle. The camera records them as they stand at the edge of the pier, watching the
boat as it departs and gradually fades away across the lake. We as viewers are left
watching their backs on a rainy landscape, with the mountains in the far background
and the vanishing boat in between.

After a pause where nothing seems to be happening, the hotel owner (played by
Vangelis Kazan whom we had seen as Aigisthos in the previous film) starts walking
away from the pier towards the hotel. The camera – which had been standing still, as
if observing them from a certain distance in actual time and from an almost human
eye-level – starts a slight recessional movement to the left as it follows him. Without
a cut, the shot changes from an establishing shot to a medium tracking shot where we
can see Kazan’s whole body up to the knees. The camera moves along with him,
framing him from an almost vertical angle while retaining a certain lead. As he is
walking, a voice from a loudspeaker is heard offscreen to the left, from the direction
where Kazan is heading. Almost immediately, Kazan comes across a few people who
are standing immobile, staring offscreen to the left.

The voice from the loudspeaker is proclaiming the benefits received from the
Marshall Plan. The so-called Marshall Plan, whose official name was the European
Recovery Program (E.R.P), was a package of large-scale financial aid that the United
States launched for its European allies whose economies had been ravaged by the
Second World War. Introduced in 1947, the Marshall Plan was welcomed throughout
Europe – except in the countries of the Soviet bloc, which refused it due to its
political and diplomatic restrictions. The voice proclaims that the budget of the
current financial year (1949-50) has been positive.

While Kazan moves further into the crowd, the camera speeds up and gradually
leaves him behind as he tries to make his way through. Set on a crane, the camera
scans the space – as if inside the crowd, but at a slight diagonal from above – and

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then pans to the left, revealing a cinema screen placed on two poles in front of the
crowd. Rising further, the camera moves straight into the white screen until it covers
all four corners of the frame. The shot cuts to an exactly identical frame of the same
screen. Its shades are now light blue. The camera descends and we realise that we are
at the same location, later on in the evening. We now see behind the screen. Kazan
walks into the frame, passes under the cinema screen and walks towards a small table
where the man with the loudspeaker is sitting. That man is the publisher. At their
sides stands a U.S. army tent. The publisher gets up, hands a piece of paper to Kazan
and the two men shake hands as if they had signed a deal. The shot ends with Kazan
walking away as the soldiers are getting ready to screen Casablanca. Later during
the same episode, we realise that a deal had actually been made. The document is the
licence for the hotel.

The hotel itself becomes a metaphor for the whole of Greece. During the Civil War,
it was a base for partisan rebels. When the new owner and his wife visit the premises
for the first time, it is half demolished by the bombings of American planes. Dancing
inside the decaying building (and inside the ballroom in particular) the couple pause
for a moment and peer through a window towards the edge of the lake. Outside, a
band of partisans is being executed by the soldiers of the regular army. As the couple
continue their dance, Kazan approaches the camera until – at one point – his back
covers the whole of the frame. With an almost invisible cut, the shot opens again to
the back of the actor who starts moving away only to reveal a ballroom full of people
dancing. The room is being decorated as for a great feast and a band of musicians is
playing on stage.

The two sequences described above give an example of how Angelopoulos evolves
the principle of moving through time within a single take. In The Travelling Players,
when the band arrives in Aigio in 1952, the time lapse occurs within the same take.
The troupe moves into an alley and then returns in the same street with a different
line-up. Almost immediately, a cut introduces a shot almost in terms of a point of
view from the direction the troupe is walking. Pyladis is leading the way into the
central square of Aigio. Later on in the film, Angelopoulos is able to perform the

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transition without a single cut. The troupe moves up a street in 1952 and, as they
disappear off screen, the camera pauses until a Nazi jeep enters the frame – taking us
once more back in time to 1941. Similarly, the hotel owner in The Hunters moves
from 1977 to 1949 within the same take. The cut is almost invisible. Angelopoulos
moves the camera in direct proximity with material objects, allowing him to
introduce an invisible cut, one that does not interrupt the internal rhythm of the shot.
This way of alternating periods in time is unique to the director’s work.
Angelopoulos thus manages to maintain the same principle while adding to its visual
innovation. The time transition occurs as if in a uniform space.

We should note that the first time transition follows the pattern of establishing shot-
movement-establishing shot. The parallel tracking shot to the hotel owner gives the
impression of moving inside a corridor, so as to find oneself in a different room at
the end. From there, one is led back to the same starting point – the main ball room –
where the group of hunters is sitting around the corpse. The sequence with Kazan
ends when Stratos Pahis (playing the civil engineer) enters the celebration in the
newly renovated hotel. Immediately, we understand that he is the brother of Kazan’s
wife (played by Betty Valassi). He has just been released from prison after signing a
petition in which he recants his leftwing beliefs. A cut takes the viewer back to 1978,
in the same ballroom, where everyone sits around the corpse. The police is present
and the cross-examination has started. This is a perfectly orchestrated ellipsis in the
narrative. The film returns to the present, but instead of moving back to the pier, we
as viewers find ourselves inside the hotel. The arrival of the police and the start of
the investigation have been left out.

Angelopoulos is interested in the tension brought about by the juxtaposition of two

sequences, as we have seen already from Days of ’36 and Reconstruction, where the
alternation between thematic episodes did not follow a pattern of cause-and-effect
but one of dialectical juxtaposition. In the current film, it is the emphasis on the
orchestrated movement that leads back and forth, in and around the space of the main
ballroom. Starting from the narration of the industrialist which follows the account of
the hotel owner, the ballroom becomes the centre of a circular narrative.

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With the industrialist, the film turns more towards a theatrical arrangement that lends
itself to abstraction. The industrialist starts narrating the events that took place during
the national elections of 1958. The Left supporters had taken to the streets and there
was much noise outside the poll station. At one moment, everything went quiet as if
something were happening. While he is narrating this, the industrialist changes
places with a policeman who is recording his testimony. The industrialist starts
typing into thin air. The main door of the hotel opens and a man enters. We realise
that the two are first cousins whose families killed each other during the Civil War.
The man aims to vote. He takes the paper ballot and exits the screen towards the left.
The industrialist goes on with his narrative. We find out that the man was followed
by hundreds of leftwing voters. The Left won 80 seats in the parliament. Suddenly
there is a gunshot from behind the curtain. The industrialist pauses and a soldier
appears from behind the curtain, only to drop dead after a few steps. The industrialist
hastens to remark that this was an accident; it was not a suicide as the newspapers
wrote. The soldier was a Left supporter, but never had there been any pressure on
him or any other soldier to vote for the rightwing E.Ρ.E.

We witness the same type of theatricality later on in the narrative, when the civil
engineer is brought before the publisher. Two policemen grab him by the arms and
carry him towards the publisher, who then pulls a paper from his pocket and reads it
out to the engineer. The latter remains passively silent. We find out that the publisher
was acting as a prefect at the time, and that the document is a false testimony that the
engineer was forced to sign in order to be set free, after being dragged to prison for
the second time after the end of the Civil War. The Engineer was released right
before the elections of 1964, which were won by the party of Georgios Papandreou,
Ένωσις Κέντρου (Centrist Union). This party was thought to express a wider
democratic tendency in the society of the time. The grotesque sequence ends with the
publisher addressing the two standing policemen, saying that the civil engineer needs
a haircut.

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A cut takes us back to 1964 or, to be more precise, a condensed time and space that
embodies and sums up that era. We witness the fabrication of the scandal that caused
the fall of the Enosis Kentrou from power, when two secret police officers visit the
drunken engineer in a tavern and force him to sign yet another false testimony
verifying the existence of a Communist faction within the army, ready to stage a
coup d’etat. The engineer is forced to perform a humiliating dance in the middle of
the tavern, where the narrative cuts to a shot of him trying to copulate with a
prostitute in what appears to be a small room in a brothel. He screams “I can’t take it
anymore,” and then turns to the side of the bed. The camera then performs a pan to
the right and reveals the rest of the hunters staring at him. What seemed to be a
brothel room is revealed as a staged room at the side of the main ballroom of the
hotel. We are back in 1977.

In this film, everything is condensed into a kind of acting that might be more
accurately called doing, so deeply does it reveal the essence of an event. What we are
seeing is not a psychological drama. We never witness the thoughts of the hunters or
of anybody else. Their thoughts are descriptions of events, narratives related to their
actions and their actions are a product of social relations. There are hardly any
dialogues in the film. In the sequence described above, the publisher is quoting the
engineer’s testimony. When the two security officers approach the civil engineer in
1963, they merely read out his fabricated statement. In The Travelling Players we
called this kind of acting gestive, borrowing the term from Brecht who saw the
movement of the actor as something other than itself: a sort of quotation mark,
implicitly critical of the character that the actor is playing. 9 What better example of
this kind of acting can we find than the sequence of the industrialist’s wife when she
dances with the absent king?

Towards the end of the film, when the guests have arrived to celebrate New Year’s
Eve 1978, we see Eva Kotamanidou (who acted as Elektra in The Travelling Players
and now plays the industrialist’s wife) pointing towards the door of the ballroom,
calling everyone’s attention to the arrival of the king. 10 Kotamanidou bows before
thin air, and then starts dancing as if she were dancing with the king. The dance

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evolves into an orgasmic experience, where she writhes on the floor and mimes
having sex with His Majesty. The camera isolates her from the rest of the party-goers
as it frames her from above. We see nothing but her, in ecstatic spasms, and the floor
around her. When she finishes, she adjusts her hair and starts getting up slowly, when
a clap of thunder breaks the intensity of the sequence. The camera tilts upwards, and
we see all the revellers clapping as if they had witnessed a great performance. It is
this applause – along with Kotamanidou’s slight bow to her ‘audience’ – that makes
this a gestive sequence, a grotesque parody of Royalist sympathisers.

In Brechtian terms, the performance calls attention to itself as ‘performance’. 11 It

verifies its truth as a reconstruction, an interpretation of history. This reconstruction
offers a view of the world, a view that the spectator can challenge or accept. This is
not to say that the film advocates relativism. The film, on the contrary, aims at truth.
It seeks and actually evokes the feeling of totality. The camera moves in and out of
the hotel in long takes, drawing full circles that encompass the movement from one
period to the next, a perpetual self-engulfing present. It is the present of the film as
discourse, at once showing history and showing itself narrating that history.
However, far from being a mere self-reflexive device, this technique relates
organically to the theme of the film. It denotes the haunting presence of the dead
partisan, as well as the amnesiac presence of the ruling bourgeoisie who – in their
drive towards ‘modernity’ – try to suppress their legacy of violence and repression.
There is no question as to the grandeur of the film’s vision. Angelopoulos views the
hunters as an entity haunted by memories of Civil War or the spectre of revolution.

This chapter began by saying that Angelopoulos’ Trilogy of History is not

orchestrated into large choruses to signify a static dialectic between Master and Slave
as in Jancsó. However, The Hunters – like The Travelling Players before it –
includes crowd scenes in which groups are identified through their action in the mise
en scène. Their doing becomes a signifier of being. Singing becomes, once more, an
attribute of social conflict. At one point in the narrative, a group of soldiers enters the
main ballroom. They walk in a group formation, simultaneously singing a music hall
song. Previously, we had witnessed this same group marching around an empty

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square, singing an anti-Communist song in chorus. This is how Angelopoulos evokes
the establishment of the military junta in 1967. Uniformity, and the rigid order of
group formation, are associated in Angelopoulos with totalitarian ideology.

While this rigid formation may appear menacing in the square sequence, it is
downplayed in the later sequence through parody. When the group enters the hotel,
the spectator must confront his or her own predetermined reaction. The group of
soldiers moves like a chorus line in a musical comedy – and it is hard not to find
them comical or, at least, amusing. The director here evokes the notion of staging
history, of masquerade. The movement becomes other than itself. Behind the façade
of the music hall lies the real-life presence of the army. They are both present in the
public life of the same country. The borders between life and entertainment break
down. The escapism of the musical cannot sustain the surplus of violence existent in
the current society. The same function is served by the silent youth in Days of ’36,
standing in line before the state dignitaries for the inauguration of the Olympic
stadium. Their uniformity and apparent serenity are maintained by armed guards
who, in the very next sequence, aim their guns at the cells where political prisoners
are banging on the windows in protest.

In The Hunters, the presence of the army comes to follow the group of the Anti-
Communist Crusade, the only other group that speaks in chorus but says only one
sentence: “We are concerned.” The grotesque exclamation ends the flashback
sequence of the hunters’ recreational trip to a forest. The circular movement of the
camera had previously marked a space of free play among the trees, until the group
of fascists arrived to receive orders. The orders will be executed in the next
sequence, where we watch the assassination in cold blood of the leader of the peace
movement in 1963, an obvious allusion to the assassination of leftwing MP Grigoris
Lambrakis that same year in Thessaloniki. On their way to the demonstration, we see
them walking in line formation. At one point, two of them spin around themselves as
if they were dancing. Once again Angelopoulos makes conscious the act of
representation. The Fascists incorporate the movement associated with the Greek
machismo dance of Zeimbekiko. It is the same type of dance that the two security

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officers force the civil engineer to perform, before he retreats to a brothel and after
he has signed a false testimony. The machismo dance is identified with murder, in a
period where it is naturally perceived as signifying an a-historical Greek manhood.
At the other extreme comes the traditional lament, which breaks into the hotel from
offscreen just as the publisher is preparing to give his testimony. One of the police
officers says it is coming from one of the political detainees in the prison yard. The
publisher orders the windows to be closed. This song is the same one heard in Days
of ’36, when a political prisoner whistles it in the prison yard, and also features in
Reconstruction and The Travelling Players.

“He was talking to the corpse…I could not overhear what they were saying.”

In a striking sequence towards the end of the film, the civil engineer, played by
Stratos Pahis (who played Agamemnon in The Travelling Players), approaches the
corpse of the partisan as it lies on the table. He introduces himself as follows:
“Testimony of the civil engineer Georgios Fyntanakis.” He pauses and then
continues: “Those of us who got out…we looked for ways to patch up…taking
contracts…keeping busy…time passes…” He stops and then, with a sudden lunge
forward and a glimmer in his eyes, he calls to the corpse “Tell me, when is the
revolution going to come?” He leaves and withdraws upstairs to his room. His sister,
the hotel owner’s wife, enters the ballroom, meets her husband and the publisher and
tells them what happened. Significantly, the civil engineer is the only one who does
not testify to the police. He gives his account to the corpse. If we were to see the
narrative as having locked the hunters in a perpetual present – where memory returns
unbidden, in order to break the spell of amnesia that hangs over contemporary life –
it is the engineer who confronts the past just once in pure consciousness. If the
circular movements of the camera create a self-engulfing space where the hunters
have locked themselves inside – disavowing the past and giving testimonies before a
fake trial – now is the first time a member of the group gives his testimony of the
past. It is the past as history and might we call it, after Cornelius Castoriadis, the
history of freedom. 12

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This is not the myth of individual freedom as a transgressive free will. Neither is it an
a-historical essence, an eternal Platonic ideal to which we are bound to return. For
Castoriadis this history
…commences with [ancient] Greece, recommences after a long eclipse
with the First Renaissance (which precedes by three or four centuries
the conventional ‘Renaissance’ of history textbooks), continues with
seventeenth century England, the Enlightenment, and the revolutions of
the eighteenth century (in America and France) and then the workers’
movement. 13

I will not attempt to superimpose this history on the film. The Hunters does not make
reference to any of these events. Yet the presence of the corpse reflects a tendency
towards the right to individual and social autonomy as well as self-government, a
tendency which automatically follows the principles of the above-mentioned legacy.
This legacy propagates the social being of the subject, who acts towards change and
criticism, towards a historically-defined human and social equality. It is the desire for
freedom that looks back on the legacy of revolution without terror and without
worship. It denies the postmodern dictum whereby revolution means terror, thus
denying a teleological cause-and-effect pattern in history that sees every revolution
leading up to totalitarianism. It is a sober reaction that does not conflate the social
movements of the past under a single banner but focuses rather on the historical
differences between them. 14 Hence the importance in Angelopoulos of the pause –
that moment where the linear succession of events is suspended between
unpredictability and indecision. This suspended moment breaks the succession of
cause and effect, making visible the gap in which a multitude of reactions or actions
remain possible. It does not change the chronology nor does it cancel history. For
example, the Greek Civil War is not constituted either by the French Revolution or
the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917. Yet it is informed by both events.

While the corpse may signify the Greek Civil War, it is also refers to a wider notion
of revolution. The Greek Civil War, in all its historical specifics, cannot be seen apart

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from the wider clash of ideologies in the same period. How then does it fit in with
the idea of revolution? For Castoriadis, revolution entails the participation of a
people who imagine themselves as an entity, and want to break free of a previous
regime to pursue self-government and autonomy. 15 It aims, furthermore, at the actual
participation of the people in government. Whether or not this is feasible today is a
separate issue, but the fact remains that the partisans of the Civil War arose from a
popular movement of resistance to Nazi occupation. They aimed, among other
things, at the establishment of democracy and the abolition of monarchy. Although
they were led by a Stalinist faction, they cannot be equated with Stalinism. The
partisans had no way of imagining what Stalinism entailed, nor did they wish for
bureaucratic control of their lives.

The dead partisan is not just a memory of the past, but also a promise for the future.
This is not, however, an inflammatory ‘call to arms’. It is, rather, a call for
contemplation. The line “When is the Revolution going to come?” evokes pathos.
Yet it is spoken by someone who has been reduced to a relic. His subsequent
assassination by the hotel owner, who has to release his fury in one way or another,
will not in the end resolve anything. Meanwhile, Angelopoulos lays bare in a
humorous manner the confusion endemic in the group, when we hear the hotel
owner’s wife remark in terror: “He was talking to the corpse. I could not hear what
they were saying”. This type of narrative progression was described as Brechtian in
The Travelling Players, where the sequence of Electra’s rape is followed by her
account of the December demonstrations, a public event that distances the viewer
from her individual ordeal. Likewise in The Hunters, Angelopoulos does not allow
the audience to feel for the broken man by following him to his rooms. Rather, the
narrative follows his exit with the subsequent entrance of his sister, who shifts the
mood of the sequence from contemplation to grotesque parody.

Freedom – in the words of Castoriadis – is an act of creation, defined by a social

imaginary. 16 As in the previous films of Angelopoulos, individualism gives way to a
social being. While we cannot superimpose a single unified theory, Castoradis’
definition of a self-constituted being can still prove useful in the current analysis. For

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Castoriadis, there are four types of self-constituted beings: the living being, the
human psyche, the socially fabricated individual and the particular society
(constituted, in every case, as different and distinct from other societies). 17 Keeping
in mind that film is first and foremost a medium of images, we will not attempt an in-
depth analysis of Castoriadis’ work. However, it is helpful to define his notion of
autonomy.

Castoriadis sees autonomy as a signification of modernity, of an individual setting

and living by one’s own laws: “Nomos [the word usually translated as law] is our
creative imaginary institution by means of which we shape ourselves as human
beings.” 18 This means that we construct our own reality, and that reality is
ontologically constituted as an act of creation. When asked how mankind is to
inhabit the earth, Castoriadis compares nomos with phusis (nature). Going back to
Aristotle, Castoriadis defines phusis as the push, “the endogenous and spontaneous
growth of things that nevertheless is generative of an order (nomos)”. 19 Leaving
aside Aristotle’s view that things move towards an end (meaning that they take a
final form), Castoriadis emphasises the notion of movement. Phusis is the essence of
things that contain, in themselves, the principle of movement. Phusis is equated with
the movement towards order, and this movement is generated by a desire that
Aristotle called eros. 20

Eros is movement, movement towards form. Phusis thus appears as the drive of any
being to give itself a form. Phusis ceases to be an object, becoming a movement
towards giving itself form in order to be. Furthermore, movement should not be seen
as the traditionally theorised movement of stable entities moving in space. That in
itself should be seen as part of a wider definition of movement, one that includes
internal generation and corruption. This type of movement – including that of local
movement (that is movement of stable entities in space) – is change. Phusis thus
becomes that which has in itself the principle or the origin of its change, of its
alteration. 21

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Rather than equating phusis with society, Castoriadis places the two in opposition.
Nature proceeds according to its own laws; society, meanwhile, moves through laws
of its own. We as humans are predestined to view nature through our societies, and
through the institutions that constitute the ‘imaginary’ of each epoch. We are
predestined to see things from within, as self-constituted beings. There is no extra-
social being that looks upon human societies and authorises their form, no extra-
historical subject who can be the judge of history. This does not mean, however, that
we are not authorised to view society as an entity, as a totality. Totality traditionally
means something that has already acquired form, something that entails closure.
Here, following on from Castoriadis, we can define autonomy not as closure but as
the ‘open’. 22 Autonomy becomes that which changes in the direction of a final form,
but retains within itself the principle of change. “Nomos becomes the explicit self-
creation of form, making it appear both as the opposite of phusis and as one of the
latter’s points of culmination.” 23 Autonomy is the project of change from within, a
critical movement towards a new order that, in itself, contains the principle of
change, thus eluding a final closure.

In this way, the films of Angelopoulos retain their autonomy towards the ‘open’,
carrying within themselves the principle of change. If they invite different readings
over the years, that is not because the readings imposed are arbitrary but because the
films themselves contain the principle of their own alteration (alloiosis), their
change. In addition, this movement towards change – as we can conclude from above
– is an act of creation. We have already argued how the camera adopts an
autonomous point of view, presenting things on a level different from that of mere
mimesis. In The Hunters, the camera creates a world rather than representing a
world. The autonomous movement of the camera, the preponderance of the colour
blue (giving a sense of permanent winter), the time transitions without flashbacks,
the elements of performance and the grotesque – these are all elements that create a
singular cinematic view. Furthermore, the film creates a world that views the ruling
bourgeoisie as an entity and Greek society as another whole that cannot be reduced
to any of its elements. Similarly, the motor of history is not identified with any of the

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individual agents/social types that we see in the film. It is society as a whole that
produces history from within itself.

Let us now see how the element of change is introduced in the story of the hunters.
At the end of the film, after all the guests have arrived to celebrate New Year’s Eve,
the camera performs a double circular movement around the tables and the dancing
couples in the middle of the ballroom. During the second of these circular
movements, we realise that all the guests have disappeared – leaving the hunters
alone once more, as they rejoice in singing and dancing. Suddenly, the doors burst
open and a group of partisans from the time of the Civil War storm into the room,
aiming their machine guns at the hunters, who stand frozen on the spot. As the
partisans of the Democratic Army surround the hunters, the curtain in front of the
music stage draws open. The partisan who lay dead on the table now starts walking
into the room, to assume command of the partisans.

How are we to view this episode but as an alternative reading of the resurrection? As
Andrew Horton points out, the partisan rebel is a Jesus Christ figure who rises at the
end of the film. As Horton rightly points out, the whole narrative evolves in a
circular pattern with the partisan at its centre. 24 To that we should add that it
incorporates, in this scene, the most important narrative in the whole of Christian
Orthodox dogma – the resurrection. As one of the cornerstones of Greece’s national
religion, it is by extension a central myth that aims at social cohesion and national
identity. As in the previous film, Angelopoulos takes a myth and places it in a
historical context.

Sergio Arreco points out that what we see in the film is the contrast between a
primordial and ahistorical structure that illuminates a blasphemous historical
present. 25 In The Travelling Players he sees the use of the myth of the Atreides as a
model that explains the historical behaviour of modern Greece. Arreco notes that
Angelopoulos “by having that myth enriched with further structural changes,
succeeds in discovering again what lies behind the distortions that the myth has
suffered due to the influences of a blasphemous popular tradition”. 26 In other words

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Arreco is searching for a return in an ahistorical essence that one can have access to
if one tears down the veil of the present. Arreco speaks of the possibility to have
open access to an unmediated past.

In contrast to this type of structural analysis I have claimed that the myth of the
Atreides in The Travelling Players is used as a narrative vehicle in a manner similar
to how James Joyce uses the Odyssey in Ulysses: as a form that does not carry with it
the essence of a primordial past. What we have in The Travelling Players and what
we see in the current film is rather a historical perspective on a society as a whole.
This society is informed by myths and meanings that refer back to antiquity. What
we see in Angelopoulos is exactly this gap between past and present. The myth is
given a historical dimension. If we were to see resurrection as part of a mythical
narrative that informs the history of a nation then it is exactly the blasphemous
present that will shed light to its essence. If religion aims at creating a homogenous
identity, Angelopoulos uses the same myth that retains a total view on a given
society but reverses its symbolic function. The myth now makes visible the gaps of
cohesion; it presents the Other that has been suppressed in the history of the victors.
Angelopoulos re-enacts the most central religious myth that informs the Greek
identity and interprets it in a social context.

We should note here that the Greek word for revolution is epanastasis; resurrection
is anastasis. The etymology for anastasis would be ‘to rise,’ while epanastasis
means to ‘to rise again’. Whereas the former happens only once – and then informs
mankind for the subsequent final closure of history with the Second Coming – the
latter denotes its perpetual occurrence throughout history. It will happen again and
again, and each time will be different than the time before. If the ruling bourgeoisie
is imprisoned (or is trying to imprison itself) within a perpetual amnesiac present, it
is the presence of the corpse that breaks the circle and reintroduces history.

Each journey into the past is an attempt to reintroduce memory and shatter the
amnesiac acting out of the hunters. Angelopoulos shatters the order of the status quo,
but does not leave an arbitrary chaos in its place. We should note that each journey

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into the past begins at the point where the previous one left off in terms of
chronology. Angelopoulos follows a strict chronological sequence in his
representation of historical events, moving gradually from 1949 to 1978. This is not,
however, a sequence of cause and effect. As noted above, the break or the pause
introduces a multitude of different actions – all of which are possible at any given
time. Angelopoulos aims to introduce meaning to the present, and does so by
revisiting the past through memory. As Paul Connerton points out: “past history is an
important source of our conception of ourselves.” 27 He also notes that “to remember
is precisely, not to recall events as isolated; it is to become capable of forming
meaningful narrative sequences.” 28

Twice in the film, we see the hunters rejoicing and singing in chorus as they try to
hold their grip and establish their presence through communal songs of joy. On both
occasions, it is history that intervenes. The first time is right after the police arrive.
The hunters are about to fabricate the event in a spasmodic manner, and we see them
gathering by the windows of the main room. The camera follows their gaze out of the
window and onto the lake, where the sound of a harmonica introduces a group of
boats rowing past. From each boat hangs a red flag. The same image is repeated
close to the end of the film, after the hunters leave the hotel – singing merrily in yet
another attempt to block out what is happening. The sound of the harmonica freezes
their singing. They turn their gaze to the right along with the camera, and we see the
same group of boats floating by. The nostalgic tune becomes a reminder of the Other
that refuses to participate. We should not see the red flags as the excluded Other, nor
as a signifier for the Communist Party in Greece. They are, rather, a power of
negation: a power that moves around and away from the hunters, who are isolated at
the edge of the hotel. As we noted at the beginning of this chapter, it is the voice of a
society that refuses to acknowledge the power of the established status quo.

Back into the snow

After the hunters and their wives are apprehended, they are led outside the hotel and
placed in line with their backs to the pier. That was the place where we saw the

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group of partisans being executed by a band of soldiers, when the hotel owner first
visited the premises in 1949. The partisans read out a decision of their own
autonomous tribunals from the time of the Civil War. The date in the document is 29
August 1949, which marked the official end of the Civil War. While the document
establishes the date and declares the authority of the tribunal as the court of the
people, we never hear the sentence that is passed. All that is said after the
presentation is: “In the name of the Government of the Mountain, in the name of
Revolution”.

We never actually see who is reading the document. By the time the partisan starts
reading, a panning shot takes the viewer from one group to the next. The voice of the
partisan is heard over a shot of the lake, with a mountainous landscape in the
background. This is the way Angelopoulos chooses to render the communal voice of
the partisans – and, probably, equate their sense of justice with the immanent law of
the society that reads the verdict. By the time the camera reaches the hunters, there is
silence. Adopting a frontal perspective, the camera places us – as viewers – in direct
confrontation with them, as if the director wants us to take the place of the court. The
sound of machine gun fire breaks the silence; the hunters fall to the ground. The
camera remains stationary, framing them as they lie motionless. After a long pause,
they start to move slowly. They get up and start back to the hotel. The camera
performs the exact opposite movement as before, when it established the space of the
execution. The partisans are nowhere to be seen.

Once back in the hotel, the group of hunters – who had been moving slowly, like a
group of sleepwalkers – adopt the same dancing positions as before the partisan raid.
They stand immobile, as if waiting for the signal to move. The industrialist’s wife
goes back up on stage and starts playing the piano as before. The whole group starts
to sing and dance, as if the whole sequence of the execution had been no more than a
dream. After a few moments, however, the singing fades out and the piano falls silent
as the dancers come to a halt. Angelopoulos cuts back to the same snowy landscape
as at the start of the film. The hunters are carrying the body of the partisan in a
blanket. The civil engineer is back there with them. They stop in the middle of

131
nowhere, and start burying the body under the snow. Once he is covered completely,
they start walking away to the left. They then meet two men with hunting dogs: the
same men who accompanied them in the opening sequence, when the camera framed
the group approaching from the far depth of the frame. Passing the men with the
dogs, the hunters turn round and take up their positions from the opening sequence.
The whole group starts to move; the camera records their slow retreat into the snow –
until they are just tiny figures in the background. A non-diegetic military anthem
plays on a trumpet. The film cuts to a title announcing The End.

This is the only film by Angelopoulos that closes with an end title. The
representatives of the establishment bury the body back under the snow and continue
on their way. Yet their way leads to a wilderness of snow. The film comes full circle,
by bringing the narrative to an oblique closure. We should not see this finale as a
sign of pessimism, but as an act of negation that calls for a radical change in society.
In truth, the hunters can never get rid of the body. All they can do is place it back
where they found it. The circular movement of the narrative, meanwhile, implies that
the hunters will inevitably play out the same game, the same performance, again and
again. The film exists as a direct accusation, a movement towards the open that
criticises and negates – verifying the persistence of history as movement and change.
Nothing is guaranteed apart from that.

The body, as a tangible evidence of history, remains buried and frozen. It is from
those remains, in Angelopoulos’ view, that society must try to re-establish the drive
towards autonomy. Two years later, Angelopoulos returns to the same snowy
landscape with Megalexandros. That landscape would see the birth of one of the
greatest films in the history of freedom.

1
For a detailed account of the clash between the filmmakers and the Thessaloniki Film Festival see
Γιάννης Σολδάτος, Ιστορία του Ελληνικού Κινηματογράφου: Τόμος Β’ (1967-1990), Αιγόκερως,
Αθήνα, 1999, p. 150-153.

132
2
Theo Angelopoulos in an interview with Natasa Bakogianopoulou in Γιάννης Σολδάτος, Ιστορία του
Ελληνικού Κινηματογράφου: Τόμος Β’ (1967-1990), Ibid. trans. E.M., p. 151.
3
See Κωνσταντίνος Θέμελης, Θόδωρος Αγγελόπουλος-το Παρελθόν σαν Ιστορία το μέλλον ως Φόρμα,
Ύψιλον/βιβλία, Αθήνα, 1998, p127.
4
Isabelle Jordan, Το Φάντασμα της Αγοράς in Θόδωρος Αγγελόπουλος, ed. Ειρήνη Στάθη, Φεστιβάλ
Κινηματογράφου Θεσσαλονίκης Εκδόσεις Καστανιώτη, Αθήνα, 2000, p. 251.
5
Sergio Arecco, Θόδωρος Αγγελόπουλος, Ηράκλειτος, Αθήνα, 1985, p.55.
6
See David Bordwell, Figures Traced in Light – On Cinematic Staging, University of California
Press, Berkley Los Angeles London, 2005, p. 156.
7
Interview with the author, unpublished, June 2005.
8
Βασίλης Ραφαηλίδης, Ιστορία (Κωμικοτραγική) του Νεοελληνικού Κράτους 1830-1974, Εκδόσεις
Εικοστού Πρώτου, Αθήνα, 1993 , p.440.
9
See the chapter on The Travelling Players in the current volume, pp. 90-91.
10
We should note that King Constantine fled from Greece during the period of the junta, after failing
to organise a counter coup d’etat against the Colonels. The industrialist makes note of this quite early
in the film. In a national referendum held in 1974, after the restoration of the Parliamentary
Democratic Regime, the citizens of Greece decided against his return.
11
For a more detailed account of Brecht’s theories and how they are incorporated in Angelopoulos see
the chapter on The Travelling Players, pp. 90-91, 94-95.
12
See Cornelius Castoriadis, ‘The Revolution Before the Theologians: For a Critical/Political
Reflection on Our History’ in World in Fragments – Writings on Politics, Psychoanalysis and the
Imagination, ed. David Ames Curtis, Stanford University Press, Stanford California, 1997, p.72.
13
Cornelius Castoriadis, ‘The Revolution Before the Theologians: For a Critical/Political Reflection
on Our History’ in World in Fragments – Writings on Politics, Psychoanalysis and the Imagination,
ibid., p.72.
14
See Cornelius Castoriadis, The Revolution Before the Theologians: For a Critical/Political
Reflection on Our History, ibid, p. 76-78.
15
See Cornelius Castoriadis, The Revolution Before the Theologians: For a Critical/Political
Reflection on Our History, ibid, p. 73.
16
See Cornelius Castoriadis, ‘The Imaginary: Creation in the Social-Historical Domain’ in World in
Fragments – Writings on Politics, Psychoanalysis and the Imagination, ed. David Ames Curtis,
Stanford University Press, Stanford California, 1997, p. 6-8.
17
Cornelius Castoriadis, “Phusis’ and Autonomy’ in World in Fragments – Writings on Politics,
Psychoanalysis and the Imagination, ed. David Ames Curtis, Stanford University Press, Stanford
California, 1997, p. 338.
18
Cornelius Castoriadis, ‘Phusis’ and Autonomy, ibid., p. 332.
19
Cornelius Castoriadis, ‘Phusis’ and Autonomy, ibid., p. 331.
20
See Cornelius Castoriadis, ‘Phusis’ and Autonomy, ibid., pp. 333-334.
21
See Cornelius Castoriadis, ‘Phusis’ and Autonomy, ibid., pp. 334-336.
22
See Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary: Creation in the Social-Historical Domain’ in World in
Fragments – Writings on Politics, Psychoanalysis and the Imagination , ibid., pp. 16-18.
23
Cornelius Castoriadis, ‘Phusis’ and Autonomy, ibid., p. 340.
24
Andrew Horton, The Films of Theo Angelopoulos – a Cinema of Contemplation, Princeton
University Press, Princeton New Jersey, 1997, p.32.
25
Sergio Arecco, ‘Στοιχεία για μια Συζήτηση’ in Θόδωρος Αγγελόπουλος, ed. Ειρήνη Στάθη,
Φεστιβάλ Κινηματογράφου Θεσσαλονίκης Εκδόσεις Καστανιώτη, Αθήνα, 2000 , 2000, p. 252.
26
Sergio Arreco, Στοιχεία για μια Συζήτηση, ibid, p. 252.
27
Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember, Cambridge University Press, 1989, p. 22.
28
Paul Connerton , ibid., p. 26.

133
134
 MEGALEXANDROS / Ο ΜΕΓΑΛΕΞΑΝTΡΟΣ

A narrator-shepherd sits on top of a hill. He approaches the camera and starts

talking about Alexander in a folk-tale manner. Alexander is presented as the
mythical king who rebuffed an alien intruder and brought liberty to the people. The
narrative cuts to the 1900 New Year’s Eve celebration at the Royal Palace in Athens.
We see the Minister of Military Affairs, together with the Greek landowner Tzelepis,
trying to sell the area of Mavrovouni (which Tzelepis partly owns) to three British
businessmen. The problem is that farmers have established a commune in that same
area.

A group of English noblemen and their wives leave the palace and venture to Cape
Sounio to watch the first sunrise of the new century. There, amid the ruins of the
Temple of Poseidon, Alexander and his rebels – who have just escaped from prison –
appear as if out of nowhere and take them hostage. Alexander, who led a large-scale
peasant uprising in the past, is still regarded as a legend. He dispatches a letter to
the government of Greece, demanding a general amnesty for all those who fought
against the landowners. He also demands re-allotment of the land of Mavrovouni in
exchange for the hostages.

As he journeys around rural Greece, the villagers welcome him as a liberator and
honour him as a saint. He is joined by a group of Italian anarchists who are wanted
by the Italian police. They arrive at Mavrovouni, which has now evolved into a
commune. The anarchists are delighted, but Alexander and his rebels are
dissatisfied. In the past, they fought so the land would go back to its rightful owners.
During the welcoming feast, sheep are slaughtered while the army surrounds the
village. A rupture develops between those who want to maintain the commune and
those who want the land to revert to private ownership. Meanwhile, Alexander
negotiates with the government for release of the hostages and re-allotment of the
land.

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A fake trial is held, where Alexander is to be found not guilty for his past rebellion.
During the trial, however, the public prosecutor is shot dead and negotiations come
to a halt. Alexander takes control of the commune and establishes martial law. After
various failed attempts on his life, he realises the government has used him and
amnesty will never be granted. In a fit of rage, he slaughters the hostages. The army
invades the commune, which has grown tired of Alexander’s despotic rule. As the
army seems to be winning the battle, the communards seize Alexander and
ritualistically eat him alive before surrendering. The film ends with a shot of young
Alexander’s young son, who has fled the village, as he rides a donkey towards the
Athens of 1980. The narrator-shepherd’s voice is heard off screen: “so Alexander
entered the cities.”

Megalexandros is the coda to the Trilogy of History. In this film, Angelopoulos

questions the nature of power and ideology. History is presented in an allegorical
space, which concentrates the energies generated by the European socialist
movement throughout the 20th century while simultaneously drawing a cultural and
political map of modern Greece.

In both The Travelling Players and The Hunters, Angelopoulos claimed history on
behalf of the Left. In The Travelling Players, history is seen as the collision of two
poles, Left and Right. The former is identified as a positive drive heavy with mythic
connotations – notably that of Orestes, who stands as a metaphor for the idea of the
revolution. Using the myth of the House of Atreides as his structure, Angelopoulos
presents an epic view of modern Greek history from 1939 until 1951. The Hunters
picks up where the previous film ended. The Greek bourgeoisie that arose after the
end of the Civil War is shown 28 years later, still haunted by the past. The partisan
rebels return as avenging angels, emblems of the repressed guilt of the hunters. The
partisans reassemble to bring about justice in the present.

In 1980, however, Angelopoulos directed his criticism towards the ranks of the Left.
In Megalexandros, he embarked on his most ambitious and fully realised project. Set

136
at the dawn of the 20th century, the narrative brings together historical emblems from
disparate eras and fuses them at this particular moment in time. Their depiction
comes from a contemporary perspective, the year the film was made. Without
attempting to recreate actual historical periods through objective reconstruction,
Angelopoulos questions the notion of history itself. His use of long takes delivers yet
again the profilmic space in a concrete block, where the time of an action recorded
by the camera coincides with the projection time of a sequence as a whole. The
director’s insistence on the internal duration of the shot lends a cosmic resonance to
the mise en scène.

The film was shot in the prefecture of Epirus in northern Greece. It was the third time
– after Reconstruction and The Hunters – that Angelopoulos had used this location.
The main action was shot in Dotsiko, a deserted stone village on a mountainside
close to the town of Grevena. Angelopoulos spent almost a year looking for the right
natural setting. He needed a village with an arched stone bridge at its entrance, but
after months of searching no such village could be found. Then, almost by accident,
the actress Maria Vasiliou – who had played Chrysothemis in The Travelling Players
– saw an ethnographic documentary on Epirus (presented by singer Domna Samiou
and directed by Fotos Lambrinos) which featured the village of Dotsiko and the
longed-for bridge.

Shooting in the village, however, involved many obstacles. Its stone houses were, for
the most part, deserted and run-down. Set designer Mikes Karapiperis rebuilt the
exteriors, painting the walls and repairing the roofs. The central square was
restructured to include a clock tower, which was also designed by Karapiperis.
Shooting took place under bitterly cold conditions, made worse by the fact that the
village had no heating of any kind. The production was funded by the Italian TV
network RAI and the German ZDF in collaboration with Angelopoulos, who was
now financed by his brother and the newly formed Greek Film Center.

Still, the budget was inadequate for a project that involved an enormous cast and
crew, spending a long time on location under primitive conditions. The actors and

137
extras lived almost exclusively on a diet of bread and beans, and executive producer
Stefanos Vlahos had to intervene on a more or less daily basis just to keep up morale.
The unique contribution that Vlahos made to the film, using his own ingenuity and
intuition, has become almost legendary. It was he who convinced the people of the
nearby village of Deskati to appear as extras (i.e. as the inhabitants of the commune)
in exchange for food and nothing more. His argument was that the Greek Communist
Party had instructed the villagers to help Angelopoulos in any way they could, and
all 120 of them proved eager to do their duty.

It should be noted that Deskati was a lone little red dot on the map of Epirus, which
had traditionally been a stronghold of the Right. What Angelopoulos did should be
viewed in the light of the political situation in Greece at that time, when the division
between Left and Right was still a part of everyday life. The participation of the
people of Deskati shows the degree to which they identified their lives with
something bigger than themselves. It also exemplifies the lengths to which a
filmmaker had to go to, and the ingenuity that was needed, in order to get his film
made at all.

Megalexandros is probably the end of an era for Angelopoulos in terms of stylistic

and thematic choices. It is also the last film of the Greek New Wave. As already
noted in the Introduction, filmmakers of the 70s did not present a coherent aesthetic.
It was primarily the collaborative aspect – the fact that each director would help the
others to get their films made – that made it possible to talk about a New Wave or
movement of any sort. During the shooting of Megalexandros, many other Greek
directors appeared on the set, not only to observe but also to assist in the production
if necessary. Furthermore, a number of expatriates made their way to the mountain
village just to play a part in the film. One restaurateur left his business in Italy in
order to play one of Alexander’s rebels. In The Travelling Players, Angelopoulos
had clearly touched a chord with many leftwingers.

Such a degree of aesthetic engagement, political consciousness and sense of

adventure seems unimaginable in an international production today. Angelopoulos’

138
dedication to the film would stop at nothing. During the search for locations,
Angelopoulos and Sofikitis (his location photographer) were caught in a snowstorm
and had to spend the night in a deserted house in sub-zero temperatures. The next
morning found the director almost frozen. Such dedication, however, soon brought
results. During the shoot, Angelopoulos immersed himself so deeply in his vision
that he became a hate figure for the rest of the crew. Demanding an almost
reverential attitude to the project, he often found himself in direct conflict with
Yorgos Arvanitis, his long-term director of photography. Like Alexander himself,
Angelopoulos found himself gradually turning into a despot.

Furthermore, Omero Antonutti – famous for his role as the father in Paolo and
Vittorio Taviani’s Padre Padrone (1977) – was isolated from both the crew and the
other actors in order to identify with the character of Alexander. In the film,
Alexander is constantly left without dialogue, so Antonutti had to become this silent
body and soul. He was also forbidden to appear in public without his costume. This
was a major source of frustration for the actor, who was a comedian by temperament.
Demanding to see the script so he could trace how his character developed, he was
annoyed by Angelopoulos’ tendency of changing it without notice.

As the situation grew worse, the director faced all-out rebellion from the majority of
the cast and crew, who could no longer cope with the harsh weather and primitive
conditions of Dotsiko. Slogans denouncing Angelopoulos began to appear on the
walls of the stone houses. Constantly dissatisfied and obsessed with finding the
perfect weather conditions for each sequence, Angelopoulos prolonged the shoot
indefinitely until the budget threatened to run out. It should be noted that, in order to
accommodate a theatrical release, whole sequences had to be omitted from the final
cut. The film, whose final print lasts for three hours, could easily have run for almost
five. Megalexandros has two alternative cuts than the one that was finally released. 1

Angelopoulos’ fame had by now grown beyond Greece, a fact that allowed him to
produce a film on an international budget. Furthermore, the film shoot remains
exemplary in its resistance to the reification of the artwork. Fredric Jameson notes

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how, under a capitalist state, the quality of one craft – its unique and intrinsic value –
is homogenised into an objective and quantitative measure of its value as a
commodity. A craft such as weaving can thus be subjected to the same measure of
quality as another (writing, for example) as means to a profitable end.
Megalexandros, however, becomes a process that dismantles the dictum of
commodity reification. 2 The production of the film turns into an adventure where the
director is constantly at odds with – and in defiance of – the film’s budget. The utility
value of its elements is torn apart, much like the costumes that Armani made for the
English lords who are kidnapped by Alexander. The costumes were dragged and
battered as the characters are driven through the muddy and snowy landscapes
towards the commune. They become elements in the process of a phenomenological
being there as opposed to being part of a featured advertisement. The film becomes
an end in itself. Its inner quality is drawn by the dialectics of the natural setting as it
meets the reconstructive eye of the camera. Their synthesis generates an allegorical
circular space for the movement of the socialist ideal, which is now materialised in
the northern mountains of Greece.

This is not to say that the film escapes the laws of the market. That would require a
different social system. Still, the fact that people from the four corners of the world
gathered in a deserted village in Epirus, just to help in the production – with
absolutely no hope of profit at the end – turns the film into a collective praxis. It is an
act of passion, defying any industrialised view of cinema. Angelopoulos arrived in
Epirus straight from his rented room in Exarheia in Athens, where he had written the
script in a state of dire poverty. Megalexandros went on to win the Golden Lion at
the 1981 Venice Film Festival, but that did not guarantee a wide audience. Sadly, the
film attracted only 180,000 viewers in Greece on its initial release. 3 It remains one of
the least-seen Angelopoulos films, as well as one of the most neglected by
international film theorists. While this may be a small compensation, it also tends be
the favourite among Angelopoulos devotees.

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The sublime image of Megalexandros

Megalexandros is not the historical figure of Alexander the Great. It is, rather, the
incarnation of his myth as it has grown across the centuries. Reference to the
historical figure of Alexander is made only by the narrator in the introduction. Still,
this account is not based on historical records. The narrator is a shepherd played by
Stratos Pahis, familiar as Agamemnon in The Travelling Players and the building
contractor in The Hunters. His retelling presents Alexander as the liberator of a
language and a people. He is the mythical hero who sets to discover the impossible -
the edge of the world. 4

The account is a variation on the first paragraph of the short folk tale The Rag of
Megalexandros 5 , an amalgamation of the various tales and myths of Alexander as
they took shape after his death. The writer of the rag is anonymous. It is not by
accident that the film is called Megalexandros and not Alexander the Great. The
compound word Megalexandros replaces the title bestowed on him by historians,
who saw fit to confer the same title on Emperor Napoleon of France and Tsar Peter
of Russia. Megalexandros is a name given by folk tradition; it stands for a mythical
figure whose sister was a mermaid on a rock in the open sea close to Hellespont. She
stands there awaiting her brother’s return from the depths of Asia. Whenever a ship
passes, she asks its captain, “Is King Alexander still alive?” If he answers no, she
sinks the ship.

Megalexandros makes his way into the world of diegesis through this folk tradition.
He is an ambiguous figure, standing not only for the pain of exile but also for the
repressed imperialist tendencies of a grandiose nationalist. Alexander became the
theme for numerous songs and tales, including the shadow play Karagiozis that
appeared under Ottoman rule. Here the mythical hero returns in order to fight and
slay a dragon, in a manner reminiscent of St. George in the Orthodox Christian
dogma. 6

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It is this Alexander, the mythical folk hero, who appears at the dawn of the 20th
century. He is an amalgamation of mythical and historical signs. Alexander is now an
outlawed rebel chieftain, imprisoned for his defiance of the landowners. When his
picture is taken by a group of journalists who come to the village, Alexander poses
sitting astride a horse, his sword raised above his head, as if ready to strike. A huge
stretched cloth is set as the background for the photograph. On it a dragon is drawn,
as if Alexander were about to slay it. He is dressed in a foustanela, which is an
appropriation of the ancient toga. It is a garment that starts at the waist and reaches
down either to the knees or to the ankles. His shoes are the traditional pigskin
tsaroyhia. Both items of clothing form part of the traditional mainland costumes that
developed under Ottoman rule, and are associated with those worn by the leaders of
the Greek Revolution of Independence in 1821.

Alexander also wears an ancient Corinthian hoplite helmet, a direct allusion to the
Greek chieftain Theodoros Kolokotronis, one of the main leaders of the 1821
revolution. Kolokotronis was a member of the Filiki Etairia, a pre-revolutionary
organisation that aimed to found an independent Greek state based on Orthodox
Christian dogma. The Etairia and its founding members from Odessa saw the idea of
a Greek nation state as a direct descendant of the Ancient Greek world, and this is
what Kolokotronis’ Corinthian helmet came to signify. In the 19th century, the image
of the Greek chieftain with the ancient helmet met with great enthusiasm from the
European bourgeoisie, whose Romantic nationalist projections seemed to run along
Hellenistic lines. Kolokotronis himself supported the idea of a Greek-Albanian
federation where both Christians and Muslims would coexist, thus echoing the
manifesto of the pre-revolutionary Rigas Feraios, who stood for a Balkan federacy as
opposed to autonomous ethnic states. Feraios, whose poetry did much to inspire the
Revolution, met his death at the hands of the Ottomans. 7

The filmic Alexander goes further than being just an amalgamation of past motifs.
He also evokes the upcoming events of the 20th century, particularly the rebels of the
Civil War. The long beard he wears is that of Aris Velouhiotis, one of the leading
figures of the Greek resistance against the Nazis and the first phase of the Civil

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War. 8 He was the leader of E.Λ.Α.Σ. (Greek Popular Resistance Army), the military
organisation of Ε.Α.Μ (National Resistance Front) and himself became something of
a legend. Operating in an autonomous manner and often disregarding orders from the
political leadership of the Front, he was killed in an ambush before the official
outbreak of the Civil War. (The political leader of the Communist Party, Nikos
Zahariadis, is often regarded as being responsible for his assassination.) Velouhiotis
is seen as a military genius whose dedication to the revolution was often
accompanied by extreme ruthlessness. 9 In the film, Alexander hangs one of his
rebels for attempting to rape one of the hostages. This is a direct allusion to
Velouhiotis, who had one of his soldiers executed after a similar incident.

Furthermore, the placing of the action in the mountains of northern Greece echoes
the epic narrative of the Democratic Army, the army formed by the partisan rebels
during the Civil War. The Democratic Army waged a guerilla war against all odds
against the National Army, which was backed by the Americans. The mountains of
Grammos and Vitsi in Macedonia became their stronghold. It should be noted that a
Stalinist faction assumed absolute control of the Democratic Army, many of whose
captains supported the idea of continuity with the revolution of 1821, which was both
social and national. Alexander becomes an amalgamation of forces purely by means
of his posture and costume. As in the previous films of Angelopoulos, costume
replaces the psychological profile with the social identity of the character.

Alexander is a charismatic leader who does not recognise compromise, as stated by

the Italian anarchists. He speaks only twice in the film. The first time, he addresses
his dead wife’s wedding dress, which he keeps hanging on the wall. The second time,
after the assassination of the public prosecutor, he returns to his room and recites a
few lines of poetry by Georgios Seferis. In addition, his voice is twice heard
offscreen – once while addressing his letter to the governor on his way to
Mavrovouni, and again during the villagers’ council meeting that takes place after
the slaughtering of the sheep. Alexander’s profile becomes an object of gestural
inquiry, where his bodily movement predominates over the use of speech. His
authority is established through his riding posture and his helmet, which he never

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takes off in public. His call to arms, when he is addressing his rebels, is signified by
his onscreen movements. He remains distant both from the viewer and from those
around him in the filmic world. Very little is known about his personal life. As the
guide explains to the foreign journalists who visit the commune, he was found as a
boy wandering in the streets.

During the Last Supper sequence, which takes place during Alexander’s ascension to
leadership of the commune, we see him positioned clearly as a Messianic figure. In a
traditional pagan song, the villagers who attend the feast declare his divine origin,
equating him with Saint George who slays the dragon. When Alexander enters the
villages, the people come out to greet him as a great leader. The church bells ring out
and Alexander makes his way through in a blaze of glory. In the manner of a holy
man, he goes down to the river and baptises the children. Alexander is the ideal of
the liberator who is reincarnated at the beginning of the 20th century to test his
powers as a material historical subject. Alexander has been preserved inside his own
myth.

His aura of non-being allows the people to recreate him in their own image, in line
with their utopian vision. As an absent image, he stands as a counter-force to those
powers that oppress the people. His immaterial substance allows the formation of a
promise that remains constantly in a state of becoming. When this idea is called into
material being, it comes face to face with history. The people who create him bring
him to life as a Messiah, but this Messiah is one that absorbs all their hopes into a
fixed identity that lies outside the subject of the creation. The creators will gradually
lose their subjectivity by turning Alexander into a fetish. They will then become
objects of his power over them.

Angelopoulos’ portrayal of Megalexandros carries a double register. It carries the

feeling of awe the director feels in the face of a grand personality, but it also contains
a criticism of the ‘dead end’ of any power that separates itself from the social flow.
This feeling of awe sweeps Alexander along, from the moment of his escape from
prison all the way to his ascension as leader of the commune, and Angelopoulos

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observes this progress with an almost religious reverence. Not only does Alexander
bring the promise of revolution, but also he is an image of sublime resonance. After
his initial escape, we see him appear for the first time in a forest. A cosmic white
light emanates from above, forming a circle on the ground. Alexander picks up his
helmet and weapons, mounts his horse and rides off into the woods. His bandit rebels
enter the frame. Lifting their weapons from inside the lit circle, they run one after the
other after their captain.

This is the first of a series of images in the film that are both beautiful and terrifying.
They inspire a feeling of grandeur through the Expressionistic use of light and sound,
but also invoke a sense of a spiritual ‘beyond’. Arvanitis’ photography reaches its
apogee, as the mise-en-scène turns into a cosmic field – where the predominant
shades of green combine with blue and stone-grey to convey a landscape in the grip
of permanent winter. The light emanating from above seems to come from a divine
source. The landscape turns into a stage, where the light marks the space for the
grand entrance of the mythical hero. He advances at a slow processional pace, as
non-diegetic music on a clarinet sets the tone for the shot. Already, we are introduced
to an atmosphere different from that of previous Angelopoulos films. Formerly, he
had used artificial light to support the natural light of the shot. In Megalexandros,
white light comes to dominate the frame.

The use of artificial lighting, together with a non-diegetic score, marks a shift from
the distant materialist gaze of the Trilogy of History. In the three previous films,
Angelopoulos abstained from using a non-diegetic soundtrack. All the sound was
part of the mise-en-scène, giving a sense of non-interventional realism to the images
in the film. Now the music highlights the rhythm of the shot, pushing the image
towards an Expressionist grandeur. This sense of grandeur recurs in the Poseidon
Temple and Last Supper sequences, the baptism of the children, the welcome of
Alexander by the peasants and, much later, the image of Alexander hanging on a
rock as if doing battle with the open sky.

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In the Poseidon Temple sequence, we see the British aristocrats visiting Cape Sounio
to witness the first dawn of the 20th century. They are framed in long shot amid the
columns of the ancient temple. The narrative cuts to a diagonal frontal shot of the
group taken from human eye-level. The camera frames the group moving away from
the temple, towards the edge of a nearby cliff. Lord Mancaster moves slightly ahead,
reciting an extract from Sophocles’ Antigone in Ancient Greek. As it follows the
group, the camera performs a pan from right to the left and then starts a slight
recessional movement, while the group turns immobile at the edge of the cliff with
their backs at a 90° angle to the lens. The camera also comes to a standstill, framing
the backs of the group as they contemplate the cape. What we see is their bodies, the
open sky and the sea that lies beneath them.

After a pause, the group sighs in astonishment. They start receding slowly out of the
frame, moving to both left and right. The shot remains empty, framing the edge of
the cliff and the background sky that meets the sea on the horizon. The sound of the
non-diegetic clarinet breaks in, heralding the entrance of the hero. Alexander appears
from behind the cliff, riding his horse into the centre of the frame. It seems as if he
has emerged, literally, from the depths of the open sea. The long take turns into a
low-angle shot of the mythical hero, a dark silhouette with the sun at his back.

Alexander emerging from the depths of Cape Sounio marks the start of the drama.
For the underprivileged and the oppressed, he is an image of hope. Angelopoulos
refutes the fossilised Eurocentric adoration of an Ancient Greek past – colonised, as
we have seen earlier in the sequence, by the foreign upper class. The ruling classes in
the film are presented as a coalition between foreign and local capitalists, including
the remains of a dying aristocracy. The latter provides the former with an image that
translates capital into culture. Angelopoulos makes the aristocracy look ridiculous.
The nobility have no inkling of the plans of private entrepreneurship, as they have
been drawn between local and foreign business interests. In the same manner, they
are ignorant of (or indifferent to) the suffering that capital has brought upon the lives
of the indigenous people.

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The excursion to Sounio is part of a chauvinistic private fantasy, which excludes the
agency of a surviving local culture. Angelopoulos ridicules the philhellenism of
foreign nobles, who treat the contemporary indigenous culture with lofty indifference
– reducing it to an illiterate barbarian other (an image that is also shared by the
private entrepreneurs). The reciting of the ancient manuscript, however, runs in
contrast to the truly magnificent entrance of the chieftain rebel. The adoration of a
‘glorious past’ is exposed as an ideological weapon, appropriated so as to reinforce
the British aristocracy’s sense of cultural superiority. It comes face to face with the
contemporary (and paradoxical) image of Alexander – who is now, not a king, but a
bandit. In his letter to the governor after the kidnapping of the English lords,
Alexander speaks in a language reminiscent of the Memoirs of the revolutionary
chieftain Ioannis Makriyannis, who took part in the Greek War of Independence in
1821. 10

The romantic image of a past that can be appropriated in terms of property returns as
the foreign image of a terrible other. It is this other that has suffered at the mercy of
the lords. It is now materialised in Alexander’s rebels and the people in the villages,
in the Italian anarchists and the communards who make their way progressively into
the film to fight their battle. Alexander returns as the immanent force of a
contemporary culture that now stands as a power against the power over of capital.

Soon though, it is Alexander himself who rises over and above this culture. He
becomes a power over the subjects of the commune. His terrible image will be
appropriated by the status quo. The journalists that come to take his picture
orchestrate a reconstruction of the slaying of the dragon. The revolution becomes
commercialised, becoming a means of propaganda in a way similar to that in which
the image of rebel chieftains was appropriated in order to serve a national cause. The
language of Makriyannis, as Vassilis Rafailides notes, came to be treated as
emblematic of a naïf and transgressive spontaneity. According to Rafailides, this
gave way to an anti-Enlightenment national mysticism, whereby the artist reached
redemption through the apotheosis of his/her individual will. 11 Makrigiannis came to
be regarded as emblematic of an eternal ‘spirit’ of Hellenism. Rafailides holds the

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authors of the so called Generation of the ‘30’s in Greek literature and most notably
Georgios Theotokas, as primarily responsible for this ideological construction of an
‘eternal’ spirit. This critique towards a mythical spirit of Hellenism, as we believe, is
also reflected in the ambiguous image of Megalexandros.

Power Over and Power Against

The concept of power over is borrowed from the work of political theorist John
Holloway. 12 It is a key concept in his analysis on the fetishisation of power, under
both capitalist and historical socialist regimes. Holloway, following Marx, questions
the fetishisation of power as a force that is ‘over and above’ its subjects. Seeing in
the concept of ‘doing’ the connotations of a practical negative force that blends
theory and action, Holloway suggests a negative social action that denies the fixity of
power. In contrast, power for Holloway is a becoming, a potential power to do, to
create. It is a movement against fixity, against the ontology of a static ‘being’.
Seeing the subject as asserted by his/her doing and its potential to bring about the
future, the subject moves negatively against the power of is-ness. Doing denies is-
ness, which is the precondition of power over.

Power over is materialised in rigid structures like the state and stands as separate
from the citizen body. Power over exists when the doing is turned into labour,
legitimised as utilitarian work or identified with a political party that stands above
and beyond its subjects. Holloway sees a ‘beyond’ only as a potential inherent in the
subject’s power to plan his/her own future. Emphasisng a fluid structure that will
fend off the fetishisation of rigid structures and fixed identities, Holloway sees the
rise of an anti-power that does not aim at the acquisition of state power. It becomes
an anti-power that draws from the Zapatista movement and the Paris Commune of
1871 in order to sustain a utopian revolutionary claim that escapes fixity. 13

The film Megalexandros predates the above-mentioned analysis by twenty years.

However, it too functions as a direct questioning of the theme of power. It is a
remarkable illustration of how the traditional Marxist revolutionary model fell short

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of its expectations. Angelopoulos himself noted that the film is an allegory of
Stalinism. 14 As has already been argued, the film concentrates the tensions and
ruptures generated by the Socialist movement both during and before the 20th
century, including the Paris Commune, in its depiction of the village. One is tempted
to see the film as foretelling the fall of the Soviet Union, which reached a dead end
generated by the separation of power from its subjects.

However, Megalexandros is also a portrait of an indigenous culture and its history,

seen through the eyes of an author who reflects both on his chosen medium and on
the interaction of local history and culture with international movements. The film
delivers a personal aesthetic which – as in the previous films – has points in common
with other ‘long take’ directors such as Welles and Mizogushi. Here as in no other
film by Angelopoulos, this long take aesthetic merges with the artistic heritage of
Byzantine iconography.

In the film, Alexander gradually changes into a dictator. As the teacher says, it is the
will of ‘the one’. Power absorbs Alexander, who then resorts to any means necessary
to achieve his goals. He starts off as the power against the official power of the
government, which is negotiating the sale of the land to the English investors. The
government has legitimised the big landowners, who exploit the land for their private
interests. Alexander’s rebellion is embraced by the villagers, who see – etched in his
face – a power of negation. At a given moment in time, however, his will stands out
and rises above the social plan of the commune that has been established in the
village of Mavrovouni.

In the commune, everything is collective. The members do not aim at the acquisition
of power, which is shared in turn on a cooperative basis. This anti-authoritarian
structure has allowed the commune to function in defiance of state power. The
villagers have abolished money; their power to do has not been turned into labour.
The collective stands for a ‘we’ that is denied by individualist notions of identity.
Alexander separates himself from the ‘we.’ He does not accept the collectivism of

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private property that exists in the commune. He becomes fixed as the deity of the I.
Alexander becomes an embodiment of power.

The identity of the liberator may stand as an active force, but when this identity turns
into the leadership of ‘the one’ it then negates the liberty of those it claims to
represent. At one point in the narrative, Alexandros imprisons a teacher played by
Grigoris Evagelatos. Young Alexandros, the son of Alexander, comes to visit him in
secret. From the window of his prison cell, the teacher calls out to the boy, who is
curled up with his back against the outside wall: “Power is…Property is...” The
teacher never finishes his sentence. The verb is describes a being that is foreign to
change. Power is; it does not do. The same applies to the notion of property. Both are
established by the reign of is-ness (identity). They are fixed concepts that remain
static. The acquisition of state power will only bring forth a different power group,
which will in turn separate itself from the citizen body. Property, likewise, denies the
process of doing.

The denial of the process of doing leaves space only to evaluate what is done
according to Marx – of something that already is. 15 By saying that something already
is, one denies its ability to move or change. Things are fixed into how they are, into
an eternal being that denies doing into fixed identities of I and you. We can see the
separation of doing and done in terms of language. Doing denies the identity of I,
because through doing I am and I am not. The transitive verb to do changes the fixity
of the noun into movement. When I do, the emphasis lies on the action. Through
action, which should not be identified here as physical action, I allow myself to
change. I move from a static identity (based on concepts) into a flow of actions,
thoughts and energies that block the rigidity of the static self. I am no longer
identified by a personal pronoun. The pronoun is negated by the act of doing. I
become part of a series of acts, concepts and energies that come together only to be
dissolved for a new combination to arise.

Power is. Power is static and it absorbs Alexander into a state that denies the
subjectivity of the communards. He wants the reallotment of the land, but in terms of

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private property. Property is a fixed concept separated from the process of the social
flow. Property separates the members of the community into individual personalities
whose freedom is a façade, since it relies on fetishised concepts that turn the
communards from free subjects into objects defined by the power over of the fetish.
The individual stands apart from the collective.

In the film, Alexander hangs the wedding gown of his dead wife on a wall of his
room. There is a stain of blood where the heart should be. Although she must have
been dead for years, the red is vivid as if the blood were still fresh. The stain lies on
the exact same spot as the wound of the dead partisan in The Hunters. Although it
was 28 years after the end of the Civil War in 1949, the blood of the dead partisan
was also still fresh. It is the same with Alexander’s wife. Alexander keeps the gown
and addresses it as if it were the woman herself. It was her death that turned him into
a rebel in the mountains; in the same way, the violence of the rightwing security
forces caused many leftists to join the partisans in the mountains after the Varkiza
Treaty of 1944 signalled the start of the Civil War.

Angelopoulos achieves a symbolism of metaphysical connotations. The trauma locks

Alexander in a repetitive circle – a fact that is verified by the incestuous relationship
he has with his daughter. His erotic relationship with his daughter becomes yet
another image of a closed circle, an image of separation from the social flow. Right
after the assassination of the public prosecutor (who is shot dead during a show trial
where Alexandros and his men were be granted amnesty), Alexandros speaks to
himself in his room: “It had to happen,” he says. This could be the voice of the
director himself, to whom the figure of Alexander bears a striking resemblance
(particularly the bald head) as Lefteris Ksanthopoulos points out. 16 Trauma rules
over the man who loses himself in a circle. The fixation on this trauma turns into a
predisposed fate, setting the wheels of tragedy in motion. It is the fixity of one who
can turn every action into an act of darkness, as the anarchist Massimo points out.

Angelopoulos also has Alexandros suffer from epilepsy. The director points out that,
according to Hippocrates, this was the disease of heroes simply because it could not

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 17
be explained otherwise. Epilepsy became a reminder of mortality. Alexander is
turning into a God. Whenever he reaches the frontiers of the human, epilepsy strikes
him down. The first stroke comes at the end of his ascent into the village. He reaches
the river but is unable to cross it. Like the historical figure of Alexander, his journey
will end on the banks of the river. The end of his journey in space, and his
establishment in the commune, will also signify the shift of his identity into an
established power over. In the river sequence, the camera records the act in a circular
movement. Alexander drops to the ground and the camera describes a circle, as if
confining the hero within its limits.

After the slaughter of the sheep and the arrival of the army, Alexander turns back the
clock that lies at the middle of the square. One of the members of the council asks
why this is necessary, since the village has no need of time. “We are not ruled by
anything,” the anarchist Massimo screams, “down with clocks!” The clock has two
functions. On the one hand, it destroys the Utopia of the collective. In the social
system that exists outside the village, the time of the clock signifies a homogenous
structure that identifies the subjects’ doing as labour to be measured in quantitative
terms. Doing becomes labour for a number of hours, and it produces something that
can be sold for a price. Labour in turn produces value. The thing produced, the done,
belongs to the owner of the means of production – not to the worker, who is
rewarded in a quantifiable measure, money. Time then becomes quantifiable, as it is
filled with quantifiable things.

The setting back of the clock implies the re-establishment of a homogeneous time –
one that is objective and filters everything through its mechanical function. The
passing minutes are the same for everybody. Time becomes linear and the present is
just one point in a linear progression towards the future. The time of personal
enjoyment and leisure also becomes quantifiable – by being separated from the
doing, which is now turned into labour. The clock provides a mechanical structure
that is imposed on the subjects of creation. It stands outside; it is the same for
everybody. Clock time transforms time into an end product, into something that is. It
provides the linear structure of past, present and future. Past becomes the prehistory

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leading to an inevitable present. Their relationship becomes one of cause and effect.
As John Holloway points out:

Homogeneous time has the present as its axis… the future is conceived
as the pre visible extension of the present… Radically alternative
possibilities for the future are pushed aside as fiction. All that lies, lay
or might lie outside the tracks of tick-tick time is suppressed. Past
struggles that pointed towards something radically different from the
present are forgotten. 18

The anarchists break the clock before they abandon the village. Their act echoes that
of the Paris Communards of 1871, who similarly had the clocks in the streets of Paris
dismantled and destroyed. That is their last activism before they are murdered as they
depart from the village. Their Utopia is finished. Their past struggles will be erased
in a perpetual present, where anarchism identifies with destruction and its diversity is
placed under the homogeneous label of terror. The thousands of anarchists who rose
up at the beginning of the century will be wiped out either physically (the Spanish
Civil War, the Franco regime, the Stalinist purges) or retrospectively (from the
official history of both the bourgeois and the socialist states).

Time in the film is not a homogenous structure and it does not follow the clock. It
becomes the time of memory as it moves from the personal to the collective. It is the
personal time of the director, who attempts to convey the long duration of an
indigenous culture. Images and cultural indexes make their way into the film, but
always through the filter of his subjectivity. Megalexandros runs full circle. Inside
this circle (which is set at the beginning of the 20th century) Angelopoulos includes
allusions to events that happened before or after the time of the plot. We have seen
how Alexander becomes an amalgam of various historical and mythical signs.

The film also encompasses a multitude of events from Modern Greek history. The
kidnapping of the foreign lords bears many resemblances to the kidnapping and final
slaughter of English travellers by the bandit Arvanitakis in 1870. The naval blockade

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of Piraeus by the English in 1850 (during the Greek Ottoman conflict) is alluded to
as a text when Alexander meets the Prime Minister and the trial is arranged. The
Prime Minister himself is Eleftherios Venizelos, one of the leading figures of
Modern Greek politics, head of the Liberal Party who came into conflict with the
Palace. This conflict, as we saw in The Travelling Players, resulted in the so-called
National Division between the Royalists and the Democrats. Venizelos was primarily
responsible for expanding the Greek borders up to Western Thrace, and also for the
inclusion of Crete. While he was not yet Prime Minister in 1900, he was a member of
the government during the 1910 peasant uprising in Killeler – in which the rebels
demanded re-allotment of the land, much as Alexandros does. 19 The presence of the
anarchists echoes the participation of many Italian anarchists on the side of the
Greeks during the First Balkan War.

We can see the circle as allegorically present in the mise en scène and also as a
recurrent motif in the movement of the camera. In the mise en scène, the circle
appears both as a graphic design and as a circular formation of humans. Alexander
appears in the midst of a white light that forms a circle on the ground. This is a
contrast to the dark mass of villagers at the end, who form a circle around Alexander
and devour him. When the government soldiers arrive, they camp on the far side of
the bridge from the village. The straw hats they wear for digging also form a circle.
In the sequence where council members are executed, a group of government
soldiers is visible in the depth of field, again in a circular formation. At their feet,
another circle is drawn on the ground. Around the straw hats, the land forms a
circular perimeter. In the foreground, the communards are executed inside another
circle formed by the dried mud.

Similarly, it is in front of a circular pond that an army officer orders the landowner
Tzelepis to pretend to go ahead with the re-allotment of the land. The Anarchists
make their first appearance on top of a semi-circular stone bridge. During the war
dance of the rebels – which is performed twice, once during the welcoming feast in
the commune, and again before the killing of the hostages – the dancers hold their
rifles in the air while moving round in a circle. The whole film presents a landscape

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in which one circle engulfs another. Circles drawn on the ground meet the circular
dances and circular formations of people and these in turn are engulfed by a series of
circular shots.

The 69th shot, which is a sequence shot, turns from a static into a circular crane shot.
Right after the announcement that the government will go ahead with the
redistribution of land, the villagers gather under a tree in the central square. They are
portrayed in a long static shot, turning the screen space into a theatrical proscenium.
The villagers argue and soon they are about to engage in physical combat. The
anarchists enter the foreground and – in a final attempt to unite the people under their
cause – start singing La Dynamite, an Italian Anarchist song from the end of the 19th
century. Its lyrics involve the apotheosis of the new history, which will rise out of the
debris of the bourgeois states.

The villagers start to move away, keeping their eyes to the ground; the camera now
becomes mobile, following their movement to the right. The singing of the
Anarchists (heard from offscreen as they stand still) is in direct contrast to the
villagers’ retreat. The camera soon abandons the villagers, continuing its circular
movement to reveal the stone houses (which seem deserted) until it comes back to its
starting point, where the Anarchists are still singing ferociously. However, the
camera does not stop after a 360° turn; it continues for another 180 degrees, showing
the empty village and ending with the young Alexandros on top of the bridge next to
the clock tower, where the villagers moved off screen. The boy has witnessed it all.

The anarchists remain true to their ideology. The sequence is a portent of the end for
their movement. The people abandon them but the Anarchists stand firm, solid in the
middle of the square. The villagers move out. The camera though does not come
close to the anarchists. It is not a moment of triumph. A track in to the faces of the
Anarchists would automatically signify the glorification of the characters as
psychologically determined. It would evoke pathos and carry a desire to portray
heroes.

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The typical anti-hero of the American New Wave of the 70s, though doubting the
values of American society, is still a hero even though he chooses to fall from grace.
It is very difficult for the cinema of the West to escape the model of the
psychologically defined individual. What Angelopoulos chooses to do here is portray
the struggle of a group, which is socially defined without evoking empathy. That
does not imply that the sequence is free of emotions. The singing of the anarchists is
full of passion, and the realisation that they are left alone carries with it a sense of
grief. The circular movement of the camera, and the distance of the filmed subjects
from the lens, generates a ritualistic sequence where the ferocious singing is
dialectically opposed to the image. It is a visual comment that has its basis in form,
rather than in the momentum of the plot.

The camera abandons the point of action in order to meet this action again at the
completion of the circle. The offscreen space is constantly made present, not only
through its successive inclusion in the frame by the panning camera but also (mainly)
through the singing. The meaning of the shot is based on the dialectics between
onscreen and offscreen space, and the dialectic between image and sound. The
camera moves past the anarchists twice, as if it had lost its point of reference. The
camera gains relative autonomy; it is not ruled by the action as driven by the
characters. The circular movement seems to be the only way for the director to
portray the death of Anarchism.

Yet again, the director finds himself at odds with an editing style that would evoke
empathy or deliver a shock to the audience. As part of the new revolutionary
intelligentsia, the Soviet school of montage thought they knew how to change the
world. The climax of history, which would bring about the new history, is embedded
in the form of Eisenstein’s montage. The shock carried forward by the collision of
images would activate the people towards a common goal. The static shots of
Eisenstein had a strong focus. There is no doubt about the extraction of a third
meaning out of two pieces of montage, out of the collision of two shots.

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In Megalexandros the human agent becomes a point in the circle, losing his/her
dominance in the formation of the filmic space. He is, rather, dominated by the space
that surrounds him. The point of reference now becomes the camera itself; the
sequence becomes self-reflexive in its attempt to comment on the inability to be
triumphant, on the necessity to draw a circle to enclose the anarchist utopia – a circle
of empty space that annihilates the singing of the Nova Historia. The new history
does not come; the anarchists are executed in the sequence that follows.

The circle, however, should not be seen purely as a hopeless metaphysical structure
that imprisons the human agents. The circular motifs of Megalexandros carry a
strong sense of ambiguity, as they also become carriers of a collective motion. The
narrative does not revolve around Alexander as an individual whose psychological
profile will be the subject of the film. Faithful to the principle of the Trilogy of
History, the film becomes a fresco of conflicting ideologies. The long take becomes,
yet again, the tool that will encompass the movement of the conflicting groups as
they establish their spatial presence in the rural areas of northern Greece, the
director’s by-now permanent setting for his staging of history.

The Dialectic of the Shot

The whole film consists of 139 shots, where the long take often circumscribes a self-
contained action. Under that principle, a complete thematic sequence is formed by
two or three long takes. The equation of one take with one sequence is not dominant
as in The Travelling Players; still, this does not detract from the complexity of the
shots. The thematic sequences add up to form the three major parts that make up the
film. The first includes the palace sequence, the escape of Alexandros and the
kidnapping of the English lords. The second part concentrates on the expedition
towards the commune. The third comprises all the events that take place in and
around the village leading to Alexander’s downfall. The film does not contain the
time transitions of either The Hunters or The Travelling Players. In a way, it is more
similar to Days of ’36 since both films concentrate on the exploration of space. The

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long take is now exploring an allegorical space where past, present and future are
already fused in a multi-layered symbolism.

The shots play on the dialectic between movement and stasis. This happens mainly
through the juxtaposition of one static shot with a tracking shot, but also through the
juxtaposition of movement and stasis within the same shot. When the camera turns
static, the emphasis lies strictly on the mise en scène and the dialectic between
onscreen and offscreen space. The offscreen space is conveyed through the use of
sound. When the camera is set in motion, the elements of the mise en scène often
turn static and the movement is carried through the camera. The camera contains an
autonomous subjectivity, which can potentially abandon the action introduced by the
characters and record, instead, the space that surrounds them.

We can see this clearly in the sequence of the welcoming feast, which also
concentrates the formalised collision of the different groups in the socialist camp.
The sequence is built on three long takes, separated by three interval shots. In Shot
32, the teacher leaves the dance hall to determine Alexander’s whereabouts. The
Alexander interval consists of only one shot (Shot 33). Shot 36 portrays Alexander’s
daughter as she carries her son to the room next to the dance hall. These are the three
instances of the narrative moving away from the dance hall. However, the three long
takes in the dance hall dominate the thematic sequence. All three follow a rhythm
dictated by the tracking movement of the camera in relation to the ritualistic
movement in the mise en scène. It is an inner rhythm that works towards a perception
of a continuous visual field without a cut.

The action starts when a group of musicians enters the hall through the main door.
The camera retreats, panning slightly to the left to follow the movement of the
musicians as they enter from the corridor to the main room. It then enters the room
after them. Inside the dance hall, the communards are sitting at large tables around
the periphery. As the musicians return to the corridor and take their seats, the camera
retreats to its starting position. Without a cut, it then turns to the left to follow the
percussionist who moves to the center of the room. The camera follows its subject

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until he returns to his seat, and then frames the main door. The second action is
introduced with the entrance of the villagers and the anarchists. The camera performs
a movement to the left, identical to the one performed for the musicians, until it is
fixed in the centre of the room. After the initiation ritual, where the anarchists are
accepted into the commune, the music signals the start of the dance. The movement
of the actors sets forth the movement of the camera as it slowly pans, first to the left
and then to the right, in order to capture the teacher in a three-quarter shot from
behind. The teacher is framed with his back to the camera, so that his gaze points to
the background left side of the frame. The background reveals the empty seats where
Alexander and his men should be.

The diagonal frame allows the director to exploit the depth of field as the central
point of reference in relation to the foreground. Thus, the director avoids the cut and
maintains the uniformity of space. In this uniform space, the camera turns mobile
when the characters move and comes to a halt when they stand still. During the third
long take, the teacher is dancing with Laura, an Italian anarchist. The other Italians
are singing the song Avanti Popolo. The dance is interrupted by the entrance of the
rebels. Their war dance, performed in a circle while holding their rifles in the air,
comes as a counter-statement to the existence of the commune. Once more, the game
of power is conveyed in purely visual terms. Dancing and singing become signifiers
of social conflict.

The sequence shot of the hanging rebel is another example of how the director edits
the shot without a cut. The sequence starts as a medium shot of the stool being
pushed under the feet of the rebel, who is being hanged on a tree in the central
square. The camera zooms out while the rebel hangs in mid-air. It then turns into a
static extreme long shot, capturing the square and houses in the background. The
trumpet announces the beginning of the second action; it is the arrival of an army
cavalry unit. The female hostages are placed on the left side of the frame, in front of
the hanged man, while all the rebels move out from both sides. The two actions are
edited through audio-visual montage.

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The galloping of hooves announces the army’s arrival, a processional entry
accentuated by the lack of action on the empty stage. The cavalry arrives together
with a wagon from the background, from the street that leads to the square in the
foreground. Everything remains in sharp focus. From then on, the whole sequence
proceeds in the form of a completed action and reaction. The women enter the
wagon. The head of the army unit announces the inability of the government to grant
an amnesty. While the speech is delivered, there is no cut to the rebels; their presence
is felt rather than seen. Alexandros then enters the frame from the right, followed by
his rebels and the rest of the hostages. They advance in a straight line, one behind the
other, walking almost parallel to the axis of the lens as they leave the frame to the
left. The cavalry in turn stands immobile and speechless. When one group is acting,
the other is waiting and vice versa.

This type of internal montage is, of course, in strict accordance with an aesthetic
developed in the Trilogy of History. However, the shot also highlights another
aesthetic that was merely a feature in the previous trilogy: the systematic erasure of
depth. In the above-mentioned sequence, the houses in the background seem as if
they were two-dimensional and existed on the same visual plane as the sky. The use
of a telephoto lens, while keeping everything in sharp focus, also renders the image
flat. In Megalexandros, this deliberate lack of depth becomes predominant
throughout the whole film and is a result of an emblematic study and incorporation
of Byzantine iconography. Throughout the film, Angelopoulos incorporates shots
where he places his subjects at a 90° angle or a slight diagonal from the lens’ axis. It
is usually in front of a flat wall that covers the frame or a massive landscape where
the action is taking place in parallel lines to the camera lens.

The welcoming of Alexander by his daughter on his doorstep, like the static shot of
the teacher talking to young Alexandros from the cell where he is being detained,
exemplifies this kind of framing. Both are long shots and the background, in both
cases, is a wall. The first has the characters in profile, the second in a frontal posture.
When the landowner Tzelepis receives his letter, he is framed in a similar manner in
an extreme long shot; this time, it is in an open field where the formation of parallel

160
horizontal lines in relation to the camera lens gives an impression of flatness. The
landowner is sitting on an armchair in the middle of an open field. The identity of
Tzelepis is presented in a purely visual manner, without the use of any dialogue.
Tzelepis faces the camera. The line of the horizon is in a parallel line. Likewise, the
coach that enters the frame is moving in another parallel line. All the points of
reference are perpendicular to the lens axis. The composition thus renders the feeling
of a flat surface, where the difference in size of the objects depicted becomes the sole
signifier of depth, as in Byzantine iconography.

This is even more evident, due to the content, in the Last Supper sequence. The shot
starts as a medium shot of Alexander sitting behind a table. As the frame slowly
opens, it reveals a long straight table with Alexander in the middle and the rebels at
the sides, posed like the twelve apostles. The frame is lit in high contrast. The
villagers in the foreground are in shadow, sitting parallel to the table while the rebels
on the table are under high key lighting. The parallel lines erase the sense of
perspective and render the image with a flatness whose depth is designated through
the high contrast in lighting.

Horton also claims that, through Angelopoulos, a Byzantine heritage makes its way
onto celluloid. 20 In order to support his claim, he gives examples from The
Travelling Players and The Hunters. For Horton, the emphasis on a lingering
sensation of time inscribed in the long take invokes a sense of Byzantine
iconography, in which two-dimensional figures also seem to be suspended out of
time. The icon brings everything into the foreground, and the representation is free of
any dramatic action. Similarly, in an Angelopoulos film the spectator is directed
towards contemplating the image rather than being directed by the action.

I would also claim that in Megalexandros it is indeed the form that becomes the
prime signifier of this tradition. It is the arrangement of the mise en scène, the use of
telephoto lens and the position of the camera in addition to the duration of the shot.
This heritage emerges in the film in terms of allusion and appropriation that carries
the signature of an author, and not as an attempt at mimetic reconstruction. Together

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with Andrei Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev (1966) and Sergei Paradjanov’s The Legend
of Suram Fortress (1984), the film remains exemplary in its incorporation of
Orthodox Christian iconography.

During the second part of Megalexandros, every shot is arranged following a tableau
aesthetic. Angelopoulos uses extreme long shots, where the landscape is framed from
above in a manner reminiscent of tableau icons, which follow a similar pattern of
framing. The sequence shot of Alexander’s welcoming to the first village is one
example. It starts as a tracking shot, following Alexander and his rebels as they move
forward on the slopes of the hill from where the village is built. When Alexander
stops in the middle of the slope and is then surrounded by the villagers, the camera
(which had been placed on tracks on the sides of an opposite hill and was performing
an upward movement) comes to a standstill. The shot has now turned into an extreme
long shot that frames the opposite slope from an above diagonal, leaving the sky out
of frame. Alexander is in the middle and the villagers approach him from all four
sides. Once again, the sense of perspective is annulled.

Another significant feature, also found in the Dekemvriana sequence of The

Travelling Players, is the use of the background space as a point of entry into the
frame. Throughout the whole of Megalexandros, the human figures seem to emerge
from behind the background image. We see this in the sequence of the hanged rebel,
where the cavalry arrives from the background street in the middle of the frame. This
effect becomes predominant in all the sequences set in the central square of the
commune, which functions as a main stage for the third and final part. The bridge in
the square next to the clock becomes a passage through which figures move in and
out of frame. During the third part, the narrative constantly returns to the main
square, which is always framed from the right side of the clock and the bridge. This
constant return applies to almost all the spaces in and around the village, adding a
strong theatrical element to the film. The continuity of the action is downplayed and
each sequence acquires a sense of autonomy.

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This constant return also grants a cosmic resonance to the onscreen space, so it seems
to exist out of time. Instead of starting from an establishing shot of the village and
moving in to explore the space in a succession of geographical planes, the camera
gives the impression of observing a succession of images, each superimposed onto
the other. This is reinforced by the shots of the bridge, which connects the periphery
of the village with the far bank where the army is situated. The semicircular shape of
the river evokes the feeling that the village is a Utopian space surrounded by water.

Colour becomes yet another feature of this Utopian element. The predominant use of
ochre and stone grey, embroidered with touches of red and gold – which, in turn,
becomes predominant inside Alexander’s house – alludes constantly to a Byzantine
aesthetic. Furthermore, this aesthetic is blended with an elliptical European
Modernism. The elliptical mise en scène of the Tzelepis long shot also owes much to
Brechtian alienation techniques, where the elements of the shot point up the social
identities of the characters. The interior shots of the Prime Minister and Alexander,
where the characters are framed in front of a wall – cancelling out a sense of
perspective – belong more to an aesthetic developed by such European auteurs as
Antonioni and Godard. Bordwell makes this last point very well, but he also relates
this type of framing to the aforementioned exterior shots, where the action is set in
front of a massive landscape. Following Heinrich Wolfflin’s thought, he calls both
framings ‘planimetric’:

The background is resolutely perpendicular to the lens axis and the

figures stand frontally, in profile or with their backs directly towards
us. 21

However, the proximity of the lens in the interior shots does not seem to create an
image of bodies flattened on a wall. Rather, it creates an elliptical space that becomes
emblematic of Modernist form. If this space is ‘planimetric’ as Bordwell insists, then
the exterior shots of Megalexandros are of another type entirely, as their effect on the
viewer is wholly different. Bordwell’s description of the planimetric, in itself a
modern term, holds up well when he relates it to the last shot of The Suspended Step

163
of the Stork (due largely to its content) but it becomes problematic in relation to
Megalexandros. It fails to deliver the cosmic suspension of chronological time that
resonates throughout the mise en scène through the incorporation of Byzantine
motifs. The use of the term ‘planimetric’ totally disregards this heritage as a point of
reference.

In Megalexandros, this cosmic resonance – combined with the choreographed

opposition of conflicting groups, and the use of song as a vehicle for the drama –
creates a dynamic field in the mise en scène. This dynamic field is also mirrored in
the progression of events, which becomes cataclysmic after the army arrives at the
commune. Together with The Travelling Players, this is one of two Angelopoulos
films where the flow of events unleashes its full dramatic tension only after the first
half of the film has elapsed. In many cases, the events occur offscreen. What
becomes visualised is the culmination of intensity, which is recorded onscreen
through the recurrent disruptions generated by offscreen events. These disruptions, in
the tradition of Ancient Greek tragedy, come in the form of a herald or messenger.
The slaughtering of the sheep and the arrival of the army both occur off screen. The
camera records the impact of the events through the breaking of the news, as both
events generate turmoil among the communards.

During the shooting of Megalexandros, the camera was constantly placed on tracks –
thus giving it the potential to be always mobile. A static shot like that of the hanging
of the rebel could thus be turned into a mobile shot, without the use of a cut. It is no
exaggeration to say this is the one film of Angelopoulos where the emphasis on fluid
camera movements – blended with the rich symbolism embedded in the mise en
scène and the Expressionistic use of natural light – gives a sense of all-powerful
subjectivity to the recording apparatus. It is as if the film exists because a single, all-
seeing eye was able to blend all these disparate historical moments into one entity.

Still, if we were to see the camera as ‘the eye of God’ that creates the filmic world,
this eye would remain incomplete. It does not explain everything, for the simple
reason that it cannot. Its vision is fragmented. According to Stoic philosophy, God

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creates the universe but continues to be part of it. This God is very different from the
Christian God; He does not stand outside the universe. This God cannot perceive its
wholeness, since He is part of the whole. In the film, the eye of the camera does not
offer an all-empowering knowledge. The subjectivity of the camera itself has become
a part of the story it is telling – a consciousness at one constitutive of, and constituted
by, the flow of events. Thus, we never learn who assassinated the district attorney.
Did Alexander slaughter the sheep? Was he responsible for the death of the
anarchists? Was there a secret agent who betrayed him, and was it the same person
who was behind his escape from prison? During the Anarchists’ singing of La
Dynamite, the camera performs a circular movement but then continues to end on the
young Alexandros observing an empty space. This was not the all-inclusive circle of
a transgressive subject, but the (by now) familiar inquiring subjectivity of the camera
as it moves in a spiral.

Angelopoulos breaks the illusion of objective reality from the very first shot of the
film, when the narrator-shepherd speaks straight into the camera. The subjective
nature of the camera-eye of the camera is thus made explicit. What follows, after the
opening shot, is an attempt to question the themes of power and ideology, which
Angelopoulos observes with the self-reflexive eye of the 20th century. The film
becomes a fresco describing an indigenous culture, whose character is drawn from
images and narratives that took shape in the same space throughout the millennia.
The allusions to Byzantine iconography offer a grandiose yet critical view of a
mythical hero. Angelopoulos portrays an agrarian culture whose need to believe in
myths generates the iconic figure of Alexander. The image of Megalexandros is the
sublime space where politics, religion and visual aesthetics blend into one indivisible
entity.

Alexander represents the villagers’ need to believe in a great leader, in the same
manner that the Left believed in larger-than-life figureheads such as Stalin.
Angelopoulos might share a sense of a ‘timeless time’ that echoes Byzantine
iconography, but at the same time he remains highly critical of its mystical power.
Still, Angelopoulos is not entirely critical of myths. As he has noted, Marxism was in

165
itself a grand myth – but one that gave people hope and meaning and sustained their
image of Utopia. 22

Angelopoulos presents a film manifesto against the fetishisation of power. Just as the
narrative declares its subjective standpoint, thus shattering its identity as a closed
autonomous text, so the identity of an autonomous power over the flow of history is
proved to be a mere façade. Megalexandros is portrayed as a hero, but his
identification with power turns him into a tyrant. His separation from the communal
subject of which he is part does not, however, empower him to take control of the
course of events. As we find out, Alexander is used by other powers outside his
control. Once he realises that he cannot be the master of events, Alexander kills the
hostages in a fit of rage. The villagers engulf him in a circle and, as the director
points out, they literally eat him alive. 23 When they move back, he is no longer there.

It is at that moment that the circle of Alexander is complete. The mythical hero had
become separated from the subjects who created him. Now he is back in the cradle of
the communal subject. What remains in his place is the head of a statue, broken on
the ground as if to evoke the end of an era. As the army clears the remaining
communards out of the square, one of the officers approaches the fractured head. At
that moment, the sound of Alexander’s galloping horse is heard off screen, as if his
ghost were haunting the image. The startled soldiers start receding towards the back
of the frame until the main square is left empty. The completion of the circle does not
imply the end of Utopia. The spectre of Megalexandros remains, waiting for a new
opening of the circle; for a new appropriation of the concept of revolution.

At the end of the film, we see the young Alexandros descend into the city, into the
Athens of 1980. The boy rides into the present day, on the back of a donkey –
perhaps as an emblem of hope. In Voyage to Cythera, we will meet young
Alexandros as a middle-aged filmmaker at odds with what appears to be a post-
historical space. The shot of contemporary Athens that ends Megalexandros marks,
in its turn, the starting point for the Trilogy of Silence.

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1
The account of the production history of the film was based on interviews with Angelopoulos (June
2005) and his set photographer Dimitris Sofikitis (September 2005). The interviews are unpublished.
2
Fredric Jameson, Signatures of the Visible, Routledge, New York/London, 1992, p. 87.
3
The figure is taken from the diary account of Konstantinos Themelis on Megalexandros in
Κωνσταντίνος Θέμελης, Θόδωρος Αγγελόπουλος: Το παρελθόν ως Φόρμα, Το Μέλλον ως Ιστορία,
Ύψιλον/βιβλία, Αθήνα, 1998, p.130.
4
It was a common belief in the Greek world during Alexander’s time that the earth was flat and
surrounded by the underworld. It was Aristarhos, though, who at the end of the 5th century BC,
expressed the idea that the earth is round and it is moving round the sun. This fact was not only
neglected by his contemporaries but also by all of western historiography until today. It was only
recently that a few scholars have paid tribute to Aristarhos for his discovery. Alexander himself
believed that after India he would reach the edge of the earth. To his surprise he discovered from
travelers that after India came China. Alexander reached the banks of the Indus River in India and
from there on he started his return journey. He died on the way before reaching Macedonia.
5
See Λευτέρης Ξανθόπουλος, ‘Ο Μεγαλέξανρος-Τραγωδία και Μύθος’ in Sergio Arecco, Θόδωρος
Αγγελόπουλος, Ηράκλειτος., 1985, pp.142-143.
6
On the shadow play of Karagiozis and its relation with the filmic Alexander see also Andrew
Horton, The films of Theo Angelopoulos: A Cinema of Contemplation, Princeton University Press,
Princeton New Jersey, 1997, pp. 51-53.
7
Historical references to Kolokotronis, Filiki Etairia and Rigas Feraios were taken from Βασίλης
Ραφαηλίδης, Οι Λαοί των Βαλκανίων, Εκδόσεις Εικοστού Πρώτου, Αθήνα, 1994, p.131,214-219,
8
Lefteris Ksanthopoulos also notes the allusion to Velouhiotis. He also adds that Alexander alludes to
the director himself. See the article Λευτέρης Ξανθόπουλος , Ο Μεγαλέξανρος-Τραγωδία και Μύθος,
ibid, p. 147.
9
See Βασίλης Ραφαηλίδης, Ιστορία (Κωμικοτραγική) του Νεοελληνικού Κράτους 1830-1974, Εκδόσεις
Εικοστού Πρώτου, Αθήνα, 1993, p. 213-214.
10
The reference to Makriyiannis is also pointed out by Leyteris Ksanthopoulos in Λευτέρης
Ξανθόπουλος , Ο Μεγαλέξανρος-Τραγωδία και Μύθος, ibid, p. 147.
11
Βασίλης Ραφαηλίδης, ‘Ο Θίασος της Ελληνικής Ιστορίας σ’ ενα Ομιχλώδες Τοπίο’ in To Ομιχλώδες
Τοπίο της Ιστορίας (5 Κείμενα για τον Αγγελόπουλο), Αιγόκερως, Αθήνα, 1990, pp.19-21.
12
John Holloway, Change the World without taking Power- The Meaning of Revolution today, Pluto
Press, London – Sterling Virginia, 2002, p.43.
13
See John Holloway, ibid., p.43-53.
14
Interview with the Author, unpublished (June 2005).
15
Holloway, [Link]. p.53.
16
Ksanthopoulos op .cit, p. 147.
17
Theo Angelopoulos on Interview with Michel Cement in Positif, issue 250, January 1982. Extracts
of the interview are included in Barthélémy Amengual, Μια ποιητική της Ιστοριας in Θόδωρος
Αγγελόπουλος, ed. Eirini Stathi, Καστανιώτης, Αθήνα, 2000, p.32.
18
Holloway, op. cit. p.58.
19
The account of the historical events is included in Lefteris Ksanthopoulos, Ο Μεγαλέξανρος-
Τραγωδία και Μύθος ibid, p. 146.
20
See Andrew Horton, The films of Theo Angelopoulos-A cinema of contemplation, Princeton
University Press, Princeton New Jersey, p.26-27.
21
David Bordwell, ‘Modernism, Minimalism, Melancholy’ in The Last Modernist, ed. Andrew
Horton, Flicks Books, Wiltshire, 1997, p.20.
22
Interview with the Author, unpublished (June 2005).
23
Interview with the Author, ibid.

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168
 VOYAGE TO CYTHERA / ΤΑΞΙΔΙ ΣΤΑ ΚΥΘΗΡΑ

The film starts with a shot of the Milky Way inside a planetarium. The narrative cuts to an
image of a child during the Nazi occupation. The boy is sneaking up behind a Nazi soldier
and pushes a traffic sign out of his hands. He then tries to hide as if playing a game of hide
and seek.

A cut introduces a man waking up in contemporary Athens. He walks to his balcony where he
meets his son. It is the same child from the previous sequence. We follow the man on his way
to a film set. An audition is taking place where a group of old men are quoting the line ‘it is
me’. The man walks to the next set where he meets an actress with whom he seems to be
having an affair. We realise that this man is the director and that the old men are auditioning
for his film. The director’s name is Alexandros.

Voyage to Cythera is presented as a film inside a film. Alexandros directs a film in which he
plays the son of an ex-partisan returning from self-imposed exile after thirty two years.
Spyros, the father had fled to the countries of the Eastern Bloc after the end of the Greek
Civil War in 1949.

Alexandros, the director, meets the image of ‘his filmic father’ in a wandering old man who
sells lavender in the street. After the audition sequence Alexandros follows the old man to the
port and from then on we are in the film inside the film.

Spyros arrives on a boat that has just come from the U.S.S.R. He utters the line ‘It’s me’. It
is the same line that the old men were saying in the audition. Spyros reunites with his wife
Katerina and together with Alexandros and his sister Voula they venture towards their family
house in a mountainous village. When they arrive, the village is almost deserted. They
encounter a public sale of the land around the village to a company that wants to build a ski
resort. The deal is being made between the younger relatives of those who used to stay in the

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village, the few remaining elderly inhabitants and the representatives of the company. Spyros
breaks in and sabotages the contract. The deal has to be unanimously accepted by all the
owners of property. Spyros refuses to sign. The villagers react. One of the locals, Antonis,
starts a fight with Spyros. It emerges that they had fought on opposite sides during the civil
war. The villagers manage to drive Spyros and Katerina out of the village. The police finally
apprehend the old couple in an old train station that lies in the middle of an open field with
the excuse that Spyros’ residence permit has not been authorised.

The couple is taken to Athens and then straight to the port. Alexandros goes to the port
authorities after his father had been arrested. The authorities try to deport Spyros on a
Russian ship but the captain refuses to take him on board if he does not go of his own free
will. The local authorities have orders to take the old man beyond the national border. After
the attempt to send him onboard fails, they place him on a raft on the high sea until a
resolution is found.

During the workers’ celebration that takes place in the port at night Katerina wishes to join
Spyros on the raft. Alexandros is unable to do anything for his father. The dawn finds the old
couple on the raft. Spyros lifts up Katerina and unties the rope that is holding the raft. They
face the camera as they stand silent on the raft which is left floating at the background of the
frame, towards the horizon.

In 1981 the political scenery in Greece changed when the socialist government of Prime
Minister Andreas Papandreou came to power. It was the first time since 1964 that Greece had
witnessed a non-rightist government. The new government of ΠΑ.ΣΟ.Κ. (Panhelleninic
Socialist Movement) established a welfare state and worked towards the so-called bridging of
the National Division that had held strong since the end of the civil war. The first four years
of office coincided with an incredible wave of benefits for the lower middle classes. The
government was also characterised by a strong sense of populism.

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In cinematic terms the new decade coincided with the advent of new filmmakers of dissent.
Pavlos Tassios with Paragelia (1980), Nikos Nikolaidis with Sweet Bunch (1983) and Nikos
Vergitsis with Revanche (1983) pointed the way towards new themes that reflected a
generation that was growing tired either of petit bourgeois materialist values or the sterile
agenda of orthodox communism. The wave of new directors concentrated on the
micronarratives of groups that refused to see themselves as part of a left/right dichotomy but
rather drew autonomous paths in their attempt towards self-definition.

With the rise of the new decade and after completing Megalexandros, Angelopoulos was
planning to film one of the most renowned novels of modern Greek literature, The Third
Wedding (Το Τρίτο Στεφάνι) written in 1963 by Kostas Tahtsis. The project was never
realised and in 1982 Angelopoulos directed a short TV documentary as part of a series
funded by the Italian production company Trans World Films. The series featured many
European directors, each creating a short profile of a European city. The Taviani brothers
made a film on Rome; Miklos Janscó made a film on Budapest, Carlos Saura directed a short
on Madrid and so on. Angelopoulos contributed with a forty-three minute film called Athens:
Return to the Acropolis, where the cityscape blends with the director’s personal impressions
and memoirs from his own lifetime.

In 1983 Angelopoulos completed his next feature Voyage to Cythera, a film tribute to the
civil war exiles. After the defeat of the Democratic Army in the civil war, many partisans fled
from the mountain Grammos which had been their last stronghold to the countries of the
Eastern Bloc. They were refused re-entry to Greece and many were sentenced to death or life
imprisonment after being tried in absentia. In 1981 the Papandreou administration started the
gradual readmission of ex-partisans. It was a project that would meet many obstacles in
bureaucracy and would last for over a decade. The film is a fictional story built around the
homecoming of an ex-partisan who returns after thirty two years in exile.

Voyage to Cythera was shot in Athens and in locations in Epirus. The film launched the
enduring collaboration of Angelopoulos with screenwriter Tonino Guerra and composer

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Eleni Karaindrou. It was funded by the Greek Film Centre in collaboration with the German
channel Z.D.F., the British Channel 4, the Italian R.A.I. and the Greek National Network
(Ε.Ρ.Τ.). The film was nominated for the Palme D’ Or but lost to Wim Wenders’ Paris Texas.
Voyage to Cythera received the award for Best Script instead. Whether that was a fair
judgment is a matter of perspective but surely the award for best script is an ironic award for
a director whose film language is based on the image.

“One, two…One, two… I’m losing the tempo…”

Voyage to Cythera marks a turning point in Angelopoulos’ career. The retrospective of

history is completed. History is replaced by the existential drama of the individual. The
previous trilogy and its coda Megalexandros focused on the movement of larger social
groups during the events that shaped Modern Greece as an entity. Now the collective
narratives of the 1970s films gives way to the story of the individual in search of an identity
in a contemporary world where the utopian ideals of the Left that shook the twentieth century
seem to have elapsed. Jameson claims that with Voyage to Cythera Angelopoulos operates
within the frame of a traditionalist aesthetic. 1 The phenomenological wandering of a singular
hero is a road marked by cinematic authors in the sixties and before. The individual hero
facing a fragmented world that does not reflect his subjectivity is a theme that runs
throughout Modernist authors, from Kafka and Joyce in literature to Bergman, Antonioni and
Fellini in cinema.

Jameson places this shift in Angelopoulos as part of a European disillusionment caused by

the failures of the grand narratives of the Left. Despite this, he also notes that the structure of
the journey that is integral to almost every post-80s film of Angelopoulos is a form that
sustains a vision of change and belief in utopia. We also adopt Jameson’s position and claim
that the wandering of the individual hero framed in long takes brings to the foreground a
wider field of social relations that are reflected in the mise en scène. However, the return of

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utopian hope does not occur until the end of the eighties with Landscape in the Mist. For now
Angelopoulos seems to be immersed in a melancholic pessimism.

Voyage to Cythera in a way starts from where Megalexandros ended. Megalexandros was the
story of the great leader who separates himself from a communal subject and identifies with
the iconic image of a father despot. Angelopoulos incorporated Byzantine motifs to draw the
image of a mythical figure as a blend of religious mysticism and political absolutism. This
incorporation of Byzantine motifs had a double register. It denoted the presence of an
indigenous aesthetic and its incorporation in secular art but it also provided an allegory for
the Eastern Bloc states where the advent of Stalinism (1929-1953) brought about a religious-
like propaganda in order to establish absolutism.

Megalexandros appears as a mystical figure of divine origin. He is the slayer of the dragon in
a manner reminiscent of Saint Georgios in Christian Orthodox iconography. The result is at
one beautiful and frightening. The use of green and gold undertones, the suspension of depth
and the choreographed movement in the mise en scène deliver a beautiful imagery that
alludes to Byzantine icons. Yet at the same time the narrative deconstructs the mystifying
imagery of absolutism and the dogmatism of religion. At the end, in yet another allegorical
image, the father of the Left is devoured by his children.

In the final shot of Megalexandros we see young Alexandros entering a modern day Athens.
He comes to the contemporary world riding a donkey in the final messianic image of the film.
In Megalexandros the boy was a pure witness. He did not have any part in the formation of
history that was shaped around mountains and inside the utopian village. He then becomes
the bearer of memory and is allegorically transferred into the present. Voyage to Cythera
becomes his film.

The year is now 1983. The main character in the film is in his mid forties and is also called
Alexandros. He is a film director in crisis who wants to make a film about his father. In a way
Megalexandros was also a film about a father and the need to believe in the icon of a great

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leader. The father now returns from exile after thirty-two years. The return is not the return of
a king. It is the homecoming of an old man.

The father, Spyros, belongs to the generation of the troupe in The Travelling Players. A boy
immigrant from Asia Minor, he fought in the Resistance against the Nazis and then took part
in the civil war on the side of the Democratic Army, to find himself defeated and forced to
self-exile in order to save his life. He comes from beyond the sea like Megalexandros in the
Poseidon Temple sequence but now his appearance is not marked with a grand entrance. He
appears as a double inside a puddle of water that reflects his image when he makes his way
down from the embarked ship.

When the boat arrives, the camera frames the sides of the ship and records the slow
mechanical movement of the passenger ladder as it approaches the ground. The camera tilts
down as it follows the movement of the ladder and reveals a puddle of water on the ground.
The frame now shows the puddle and the end of the ladder. The sound of footsteps is heard
coming from out of field informing us viewers that someone is coming down the ladder. The
camera tilts further down and away from the source of the sound until it frames the puddle
exclusively. Through its reflection in the water we see a human figure stepping off the ladder
and standing still. We only see a reflection and it is as if the figure acquires a ghostly
presence. Spyros, played by Manos Katrakis, the iconic actor of modern Greek theatre and a
well-known figure of the Left, marks the return of the civil war ghosts for the second time in
Angelopoulos, the first being the dead partisan in The Hunters.

In the Hunters the ruling bourgeoisie suffer from traumatic projections of guilt. Now an
anonymous bureaucracy is casting Spyros off to the high seas not because he is a source of
threat but because he runs counter to petty interests. The people in his old village turn against
him and one of the villagers, Antonis, who had fought on the side of the regular army during
the civil war, starts a physical fight with Spyros. Yet at a later point in the narrative they
become reconciled. For the rest of the villagers Spyros is someone who stands in the way of
profit. Only Antonis, played by another prolific figure of old commercial Greek cinema,

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Dionysis Papagiannopoulos, can truly be reconciled with him because at the end of his life he
sees that they were both caught in the middle of the historical events that shook Europe in the
20th century.

When the two men meet for the last time the president addresses Spyros in a calm manner in
contrast to their two previous encounters: “We were used, Spyros…they pushed us into
fighting each other. You on one camp, me on the other…we both lost.” As he walks away he
starts whistling an old army song. Spyros never replies; he is fixed in silence. In a familiar
Angelopoulian manner the shot retains its ambiguity. Does the director share the same
opinion? It is as if Angelopoulos is alluding to the meeting Churchill had with Stalin in Yalta
in 1945 where it was decided that Greece would form part of the Western sphere of influence.
The communists and the partisans who fought in the civil war never knew of the
arrangement.

Angelopoulos with Voyage to Cythera pays tribute to the civil war generation. Angelopoulos
is naturally predisposed to those who suffered most, those that were defeated. It is certain that
he does not see their struggle as futile. The Trilogy of History was a landscape where the
human agent was engaged in constant struggle. He/she was structurally constituted by the
simultaneous presence of grand political narratives, national myths and cultural texts. Their
acts were affected by great historical events, international arrangements and business
contracts between larger agents of power. These events would occur offscreen beyond the
subject’s power to act. Within a circular web he/she fought for the way to redemption.

Voyage to Cythera presents a split image between an actor and a seer. Alexandros wants to
make a film about his father. Spyros is the main character of Alexandros’ film and therefore
an actor in his film. But the way I use the term actor here also denotes the subject’s power to
act and the agency of someone who participated in the events that shook modern Greek
history. It comes in contrast with the image of Alexandros who looks back in time and
records the history of his father’s generation. He is more of a contemplative persona, a
witness. This is not a contrast of a psychological nature between two individuals. It reflects

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the state of suspension Alexandros feels and a wider crisis of the subject at the time that the
film was made.

Spyros’ return is marked by his immediate reaction against the commercialisation of his
village. The old partisan returns from exile wearing a coat and carrying a suitcase in his
hands. His tall posture and the determination in his walk denote his strong presence. When
Spyros arrives at the village we see him dancing in the graveyard. It is a proud dance and the
sound of the Pontiac Lyra marks the affective nature of the shot. We as spectators follow
Spyros to the public selling off of the village farms. Spyros withdraws in haste towards his
hut in the fields where he picks up his shovel and starts working on the land. The villagers
react and they run towards him. Spyros refuses to sign the documents agreeing to the sale of
the land. The Angelopoulian hero returns to an unfamiliar space. The villagers want him out.
The President reads him aloud the death sentence that the court marshal imposed on him in
absentia: “Spyro you do not exist. You are a dead man.” The president comes to Spyros’
house in the middle of the night. Finally the villagers burn his hut and then drive him out of
the village. Together with his wife Katerina he wanders among a desolated setting of
rundown neoclassical buildings in a city until they find temporary shelter in a train station.
The station is a transitory space in the middle of nowhere symbolised by the name
Mesohorion (the space between). It symbolically denotes the state of limbo that has taken
over the old couple.

In the next stage of the film, the official authorities take their turn. In a grotesque manner
familiar from Days of ’36 they become carriers of the absurd. Spyros is caught in yet another
web. He does not have a residence permit and his citizenship has not yet been recognised.
The police lieutenant asks Alexandros: Are you sure this person is your father, he could be
anyone…Without us seeing an agent of higher authority we are left witnessing a group of
men in uniforms who after following orders attempt to send Spyros off Greek national
territory. When they fail to make Spyros embark on a Russian ship they then place him on a
raft on the open sea.

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Angelopoulos portrays Spyros in terms of a modern Odysseus. 2 This is suggested in a highly
poetical image when Spyros is reunited with his dog, in a manner familiar from the Odyssey
where the hero, although transformed into a beggar by the Goddess Athena, is recognised by
his own dog. Yet again, Angelopoulos takes his everyday characters and elevates them to the
realm of myth. We could argue that together with The Travelling Players and Megalexandros
the film becomes a third attempt to incorporate ancient myths. All three films are part of the
same drive, notably to mark the presence of ancient narratives in the same geographical space
where they first evolved and to see how this space has become part of the psychogeography
of a collective subject affected by these myths in the contemporary world. But unlike The
Travelling Players and Megalexandros, where the use of myth is more culturally specific,
Angelopoulos now draws from a narrative that has evolved into a universal myth throughout
the millennia in order to mark the path of his solitary hero. This we see as an attempt at a
more humanistic narrative in relation to the previous tetralogy.

The Odysseus icon becomes integral to almost all the post-eighties films through the
allegorical use of the journey. Angelopoulos keeps faith in an aesthetic that clearly belongs to
modernism. As Slavoj Žižek points out, it is in modernism that the historical hero becomes
mythical, in contrast to a postmodern path that aims at deconstructing myth and putting it in
an everyday historical context. 3 This does not imply that the modern Odysseus is the
ahistorical subject of the bourgeois imaginary on his way to redemption. The film includes its
contradictions. Voyage to Cythera is a film made as a tribute to the old partisan but it is also a
film made under social democracy. The sponsors of the film that make their way onto the
screen in scenes such as the one in the petrol station where we see the logo of an oil
company, hint at the film’s mode of production. It is an inevitable paradox that Angelopoulos
manages to incorporate very well. The enforced advertisements of large companies that are
incorporated into the world of fiction become indices of the film’s angst. Yet it is precisely
the silence of Alexandros that comes as an answer. The film has to be made.

The old man may be the incarnation of Odysseus, he may be an actor of history like Orestes
was in The Travelling Players, but he is also alone. In keeping with the Trilogy of History,

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Angelopoulos depicts the futility of individual action if it is not followed by a collective
drive. Spyros becomes a voyager but his journey is not one of redemption. The homeland
becomes a second exile. The coat, functioning now as the grand signifier of Angelopoulos’
second period, becomes its mirror image. The individual is left with a suitcase to wander in
an unfamiliar universe. It is an image that is contrasted with the opening shot of the film. The
majestic opening shot of the Milky Way in motion is an image of decorated space. It is a pure
image, as if it came from the eyes of a wondering child. It is not by accident that the image is
juxtaposed with one of a boy who sees the Nazi invasion as a game. The innocence of the
child means he is fearless and the game turns into a natural act of resistance. The majestic
opening shot presents the universe as an open adventure. It is a rotating circle inviting the
viewer into a wondrous experience. Nevertheless, the universe that the Angelopoulian hero
faces now contrasts with this wonder. The collective drive is here replaced by the solitary
movement of the hero wearing a coat. The coat is the only object that can stand for the idea
of the familiar, of home.

At the other end of the pole is the son Alexandros. Alexandros as a filmmaker is in control of
one single thing: the ability to tell a story in images. That very function is now threatened. He
may order night to appear on the set during the port sequence but right before that he
murmurs “one two, one two, I’m losing the tempo.” What we as spectators are presented with
is the process of the author’s struggle for maintenance, which is in turn juxtaposed with the
suspended time of the father on the raft. The authorities are unwilling and unable to provide a
resolution. The anonymous bureaucracy that has turned everybody into an identified
functionalist is reconstructed in the port episode. The authorities work under orders; the port
workers are powerless. They are reduced to the shades of the worker partisans of The
Travelling Players. Spyros-Orestes is on the raft. The dynamics of The Travelling Players are
suspended. The workers cannot but dedicate the celebration of their defeat to the old man.
Alexander cannot put the images together. What remains is the stretch of suspended times of
waiting.

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At one point during the port episode we see a jester doing a trick show in front of
Alexandros. The latter does not respond, as if his motor capacities have collapsed. They are
interrupted by the port workers coming into the bar. An empty spectacle organised by the
workers’ union is paraded before him. The jester is reminiscent of the mime artists in
Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966). It is they who force the young photographer Thomas to
question the objective powers of his photo lenses. The young photographer watches the mime
artists as they are pretending to play with a tennis ball. Yet, even though the tennis ball is
absent, Thomas is at one point able to hear the tennis rackets striking a ball. It is an
ambiguous image which turns the narrative back to the male protagonist who now becomes
an observer. Was there a murdered body in the photograph he took in the park at an earlier
point in the narrative or was the body a mere play of shadows as a result of him blowing up
the picture? The answer will remain suspended.

In Voyage to Cythera on the other hand, Alexandros does not react to the mime and the
image once again carries a double resonance. Alexandros’ reality is that of the jester who
unlike in Blow-Up appears as a hollow messenger. The presence of the jester can be seen as a
signifier for the bankruptcy of the working class, which is putting on the sad celebration. But
the jester might also be seen an allegorical figure suggesting cinema as an empty spectacle.
Now the director is part of this spectacle since he is part of the film he is making. The empty
spectacle is not an entertainment break in the passage of everyday life. It becomes all-
embracing and objective.

Before Alexandros moves to the port he pauses in the middle of a street and practises the
thematic score of the film. He pushes the air with his fingers as if he were playing the piano.
The camera which has tracked him stops and then retreats slowly while the director rehearses
the theme by writing one note after the other in thin air. It is as if Alexandros, the film
director, is pausing in order to be able to put the right pieces together. It is indicative from the
distanced punctuation that the director is composing at this very moment. The sequence
becomes a tool, a comment on the creative process. Alexandros pauses and the image drops
its functional use as a continuity shot that connects two actions in two different spaces.

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Alexandros abandons the action and remains suspended in the space between, in the street.
Instead the element of movement is carried forward by the camera. It is as if the dialectics
drawn from the stasis of the individual and the movement of the camera bring forward the
thinking of thought. If the subject is caught inside the movement the subject is drawn by the
action. Alexandros is pausing in order to reflect on what has been shown so far and what is to
come. The camera moves towards an image of thought. It replaces the movement of the
subject in the mise en scène with a tracking shot that in its final retreat from the onscreen
director aims to generate an emotional and intellectual movement in the spectator. We then as
spectators are left free to see the sequence as a haiku for the cinema of Angelopoulos. The
absence of drama and the emphasis on the long duration of the shot becomes a time raft for
the spectator to embark and use his enunciative power in order to make sense of the images.
This is what the director can suggest after the death of the Father, a process that concentrates
on the doing not the done. It is a process free from saturated images of speed and the
emphasis on speech as identifying and imposing a fixed meaning on the image.

Objectivity/subjectivity

Voyage to Cythera appears as a film inside a film. It is presented through the eyes of the
diegetic director Alexandros. The film clearly belongs to the tradition of a cinema of poetry.
In his paper of that title, Pier Paolo Pasolini argues that the filmmaker unlike the writer
cannot be fully immersed into the discourse of the characters and imitate their speech simply
because his/her tools are not the lexicon of words but rather the raw material of reality. 4 He
notes that in reality communication is based on the evocation of linguistic and gestural signs
which he calls lin-signs, which form an objective common denominator that is in constant
dialogue with a personal world of images made out of memory and dreams. Each image that
the human agent encounters is an image that communicates through these signs. Pasolini
describes the world of dreams and memory as comprising a signifying system which he calls
im-signs. The im-signs are affected by lin-signs or cultural signs but they also carry a pre-

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historical and pre-grammatical nature. They belong to the realm of the unconscious. Cinema
evokes the use of lin-signs since they are a means of communication but their nature is
irrational like dreams, since they are not based on an organised lexicon from which they can
articulate. The image lacks the representational conceptual framework of language. There is
no such thing as an abstract conceptual image. In the cinematic image the field of objects is
transferred onto the screen. Inevitably every object will carry a set of lin-signs that is
precinematic and historical. But it is as if the object is animated onto the screen. The object is
not abstractly represented. The language of cinema is that of images and the filmmaker then
has to find a way to communicate his discourse and that of the characters through them. As
John Orr points out, following Deleuze’s writings on Pasolini:

[for Pasolini]The film images are irrational. This does not move the image away from the
Real but towards it. Gilles Deleuze has pointed out that Pasolini’s critique signalled a shift
from the arid formalism of semiology towards a new kind of language system, a language
system of reality…Movement and image are inseparable, for the naïve critical isolation of
images as ‘objects’ presupposes an immobility of objects which is not only misleading but
goes against the grain of the film medium itself. Thus the false semiological distinction
between the object as mere referent and the image as a component of the signified breaks
down. In film, image and object are inseparable. Film is not a succession of represented
objects but a series of moving images. A film language exists through its response to non-
linguistic material which it then transforms and narration is grounded in the image itself. 5

An image cannot have isolated graphemes or phonemes that it assembles in order to produce
meaning; an image is always based on the coexistence of multiple signs which in turn are
neither placed transparently on the screen nor abstractly represented. The image carries the
subjective input of its creator, the filmmaker, who now has to provide a discourse through a
sign language specific to the medium. The free indirect discourse is for Pasolini the
guarantee of this visual language coming to the foreground. Focusing mostly on Antonioni,
Pasolini the theorist points out that the filmmaker’s discourse is being fused with that of the
character, whose distorted vision of the world becomes the excuse for a new visual style that

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he calls the cinema of poetry. This is a modern cinema that breaks with the older notions of
what a poetic film is. What up to Antonioni and Godard was termed poetic was a lyricism
that drew on a static use of the mise en scène. It was a notion that drew either on literature or
on painting and the theatricality of the shot. Pre-modern cinema was based on narrative and
(which Pasolini admits as being crudely defined) the idea of the camera not being felt. This is
what he defines as a cinema of prose: a set of conventions, stylemas that have been
established as syntagmas for a universalised perception of film narrative. An objective
narrative stands as the real which entails the subjective point of view of the characters either
in terms of subjective viewpoints or memory sequences separated from the real. Flashbacks
are either subjective or objective; in the latter case their relation to the notion of truth is
unquestionable. The objective narrative defines how things happened or how a character
recollects an event; every shot then becomes identified in this bipolar system resulting in a
naturalist aesthetic. It is interesting to note that Pasolini avoids discussing the films of the
Soviet montage school.

The opposite line comes through his definition of the cinema of poetry. Irrational cuts,
breaking the 180° degree rule, holding the camera against the sun, became stylemas in a new
technical vocabulary that defined the cinema of poetry which now through a new formalism
allows the camera to be felt. Pasolini cites Antonioni’s Red Desert (1964) as the prime
example where the director’s discourse is fused with that of the main character of Monica
Vitti who plays a neurotic individual. The fusion is not one of identification but of analogy.
This means that the director retains a distance from the main character, who usually belongs
to a different social class from that of the director. In the case of Red Desert it is both gender
and social class that allow the director to maintain a distance. How is this fusion possible?
Pasolini sees it as being materialised in the incorporation of what he calls the free indirect
point of view shot. The film registers the collapse of the distinction between the objective and
the so-called point of view shot into one.

In the film A Chronicle about Love Antonioni had already visualised an aesthetic where the
characters move into the frame in a shot that appears to be registered as their point of view.

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We have already seen this function in Angelopoulos in Reconstruction. In Red Desert this
collapse of distinction meets the authorial inscription of unnatural elements in the mise en
scène as signifiers of the heroine’s view of the world. In a shot where Monica Vitti is also
included we witness a wagon full of apples in the background. The apples are grey and come
to render the heroine’s distorted view of the objective world while she is inside the frame.
Yet for Pasolini this poetical arrangement of the mise en scène is not as important as framing
the space per se. What comes to the foreground is not the action propelled by the characters
but the double register of space. This is both an autonomous entity where the characters move
in and out of frame and a double for their psychological state. As Pasolini puts it, it is the
autonomous beauty of things that comes to the centre of attention. These things are none
other than the moving images themselves. The neurotic state of the individual becomes the
pretext for the second register of the cinema of poetry: style.

Pasolini does not include in his conception of the cinema of poetry auto or semi-
autobiographical films. For him it is crucial that the director maintains a distance from the
diegetic character. For that reason Federico Fellini’s 8 ½, (1963) which has the main
character Guido acting as the alter ego of the director, is not included in Pasolini’s conception
of the free indirect discourse. Voyage to Cythera certainly belongs to the category of a semi-
autobiographical film. Yet as Angelopoulos notes he feels that under Pasolini’s distinction
between a cinema of prose that obeys the laws of naturalism thus giving the illusion of an
objective reality, and a modern cinema of poetry that registers its subjective function by
laying bare its tools, he certainly belongs to the latter.

In Voyage to Cythera Alexandros is the alter ego of Angelopoulos. We see him as the
director of the film where he plays Spyros’ son. Angelopoulos adopts an aesthetic which
technically lies very close to what Antonioni introduced with the free indirect point of view
shot. As early as Reconstruction, we saw main characters walking inside the frame in what
appeared to be their point of view. We find this in Voyage to Cythera when Alexandros
appears from the right side of the frame into our visual field during the cemetery sequence. In
the background Spyros is dancing. But the most important factor which grounds the film in

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the tradition of a cinema of poetry is that the image loses its subordination to empirical reality
and following the above quotation, narration is based in the image itself. The film ceases to
be a referent to a pre-filmic objective reality. Throughout the Trilogy of History and now with
the Trilogy of Silence one of the prime characteristics of the cinema of Angelopoulos is that
the camera is registered as an autonomous subjectivity. The movement that the camera
manifests in the first period of Angelopoulos resulted in what we have called an impersonal
subjectivity. Now in Voyage to Cythera the camera shares its subjective point of view with
that of the main character who whilst not having a separate language from that of the author,
nevertheless registers the film as belonging to the realm of im-signs. Furthermore in Voyage
to Cythera the world of the film inside the film and the world of reality are inseparable. Both
worlds are moving images.

We could claim that the film is Angelopoulos’ 8½. It was in the diegetic world of 8½ that
Federico Fellini placed Marcello Mastroianni as his alter ego. 6 But in Fellini’s film the
neurotic gaze of Guido reflects the childhood lusts and repressions, in short the psychological
profile of the director who in his attempt to make a film lays bare the man-eating processes of
the film industry. Fellini creates a surreal space where the real and the imaginary intermingle
in order to see the world through the fragmented mirror of the director’s psyche, which is
projected through a baroque environment. What prevents Pasolini from placing it within a
new cinema of poetry is the fact that Fellini does not produce a distanciation effect with the
use of the camera. 8½ does not present a split in the visual field between the main character
and the movement of the camera. The film is Guido’s film exclusively.

In Voyage to Cythera however, the camera is indeed distant from Alexandros. His moving in
and out of frame allows for a different gaze to be inscribed on the mise en scène.
Furthermore, as we have already established, the film presents the story of two characters.
Alexandros’ film is about his father, not himself. The ego of the director recedes for the
emphasis to be laid on the director as a process for telling stories. When Alexandros returns
to his office in Athens, we see the film poster of The Travelling Players hanging on the wall.
Alexandros reads from the script of Voyage to Cythera. Although the film is more personal

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than the previous Trilogy and its coda Megalexandros, the narrative still abstains from the
use of dialogue and excessive monologues in order to analyse the characters. The film does
not contain a single monologue by Alexandros. This is the major difference of the film not
only to 8½ and the narratives of semi-autobiographical films in general but also with what is
to follow in Angelopoulos’ filmography. The character might be a reflexive image of
Angelopoulos yet the film abstains from the use of psychology or melodrama. The form of
the film includes the personal drama of the individual along with the portrayal of a wider
field of social relations.

Alexandros’ childhood is presented in the opening sequence through a single episode whose
meaning is not fixed to that of a personal memory. The small boy is pushing the signpost out
of the hands of the Nazi. The chase turns into a variation of a hide and seek game. The
elusive meaning of this sequence lies in the familiar manner of extracting meaning through
the juxtaposition of sequences and in this case through the juxtaposition of this sequence with
the rest of the film. One could interpret the child’s play as an act of rebellion that unites him
with the image he had built for his father. Or is it the confession of somebody who wants to
make a film about a father but does not share the same experience and is thus left to observe
from a distance? Either interpretation could be true. Furthermore we are never certain if this
episode is a dream or a real memory. What comes to the foreground is the attempt to portray
the creative process of storytelling. It is a process that although for the first time attempting to
open up the characters’ psychology, still follows Benjamin’s dictum for an ambiguous
rendering that will activate the receiver to constitute the story as his and then act as another
transmitter. 7

Benjamin cites Herodotus’ story of the Egyptian king Psammenitus who after being defeated
by the Persian king Cambyses is tied up and forced to watch his family paraded before him as
slaves. He remains silent but at the sight of one of his former slaves he breaks into tears. 8
This is a narrative that follows a pattern of juxtaposing images as if an observer is watching
the event without imposing his/her interpretation.

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We find the same pattern in Voyage to Cythera. Spyros starts digging the earth during the
public sale of the farms. His act can easily be read as an opposition to the sale. Yet the
director abstains from laying bare the man’s thoughts. Why is Spyros fixated on keeping
barren land? The answer will not be provided by delving into the man’s psyche. It will have
to be extracted from a set of relations based on the poetics of the image. When Spyros returns
to his hut we see him in a seemingly objective shot approaching from the background holding
a shovel in his hands. On his left side lies a tree. Its colour is blue, reminiscent of the
outlandish grey apples that lie on a cart next to Monica Vitti when she comes out of her
house in Antonioni’s Red Desert.

The blue tree transforms the landscape from an objective space to a semi-subjective visual
field. The land becomes an im-sign belonging to the realm of memory and dreams. The land
as seen through the eyes of Spyros generates colour. The shot is contrasted with the shot
which immediately follows: an objective shot of his hut being burned to the ground by the
villagers. We should not be confused though: the film does not present the point of view of
Spyros. It is only in that particular shot that the director immerses himself into the old man’s
psyche. Throughout the rest of the film, Spyros is seen from the point of view of Alexandros,
whose vision directs the film.

Another question arises. Are we actually seeing Alexandros’ film being made or does this
only take place in the imagination of the director? From the moment that the actress appears
as Alexander’s sister in the port, informing him of their father’s arrival, we are in the film
inside the film. The transition, however, happens without a cut. Alexandros follows the old
man to the port where the latter vanishes off frame. Alexandros is left contemplating, looking
off screen to the left, in the direction that the old man left in. Without cutting away from him,
the actress then appears from this same place and addresses Alexandros as her brother. The
distinction between the fictional world and the real world is blurred.

The inner film becomes the film itself where Alexandros functions both as son and
filmmaker. A conventional way of portraying the film inside the film would be to expose the

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apparatus of the film being made. That on the other hand would identify the distinctions
between two worlds, that of fiction and of an objective reality. The world of fiction though in
this case is blended with the ‘objective’ reality. It is the world of dreams that meets the
objective world in one entity, the realm of the cinema of poetry. The question of a film inside
the film is thus a false question. In Voyage to Cythera there is no film inside the film. There
is only the semi-subjective shot that encompasses Alexandros’ mental state. It carries the
image of the father as a recollection image of a social force who has been reduced to a
solitary old man.

When Spyros returns in terms reminiscent of a modern Odysseus, his dog is there to welcome
him after thirty-four years. This is a paradoxical image. In reality the dog would have been
dead for years. Similarly when the family enters the house in the village for the first time the
table is already set for them. In The Travelling Players we saw Elektra going through the
streets of Athens and then finding her way to the guerrilla camp although in the previous
sequence she had claimed with historical accuracy that the fighters had their stronghold in the
mountains. I claimed then that the camera does not map a realistic objective space but rather
marks a trail of remembrance that can unite disparate actions, similarly to the way it brought
together actions from different chronological periods. It is the same with Voyage to Cythera
where the mental space of Alexandros materialises the return of modern Odysseus. It is this
mental space that comes to the foreground not only through the use of the camera and the
staging of the mise en scène but also through the main musical score that finds its way onto
the screen and throughout the whole film in minor variations.

The music of Eleni Karaindrou marks its first entrance in the Angelopoulian filmography for
Voyage to Cythera, only to become a permanent feature of his later films. We will not call it
non-diegetic. In Megalexandros, where Angelopoulos used post-production music for the
first time since Reconstruction, the mood was different. The transgressive theme of the
clarinet accompanied by the Japanese-style chorus chant generated an all-inclusive space that
superimposed the characters in the mise en scène. In Voyage to Cythera, the music combined
with the space becomes part of the metal state of the main characters. We saw how

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Alexandros practised the main theme by pushing his fingers into thin air in the middle of the
street. Every stroke of his fingers carries a note from Karaindrou’s theme. Therefore the term
non-diegetic becomes totally inaccurate. The post-production music now becomes one with
the mode of the image which in turn carries the characters’ discourse. Similarly, when Spyros
goes to greet his dead companions in the graveyard he dances to the sound of a Pontiac lyre
that is in his mind. The audience shares this moment of ecstatic lament but the arousal of
emotions does not reach the point of ecstasy for the audience; the camera refuses to reach a
close up. Once again the camera portrays a situation of man among rather than man and.
However, this breakdown of reason in order to enter the realm of poetry does not underline
the triumph of the distracted will. That would result in an escapist film. Angelopoulos enters
the realm of imagination and dreams but that does not pull him away from the social.
Alexandros might be in control of the time and space in the form of the film but he cannot
control the action of the agents that send Spyros onto the raft.

There is a further point to be made about the semi-subjective shot. For Deleuze it denotes a
dividing in two of the same subject. Citing Henri Bergson he notes that:

two different egos [moi] one of which, conscious of its freedom, sets itself up as independent
spectator of a scene which the other would play in a mechanical fashion. But this dividing in
two never goes to the limit. It is rather an oscillation of the person between two points of
view on himself, a hither and thither of the spirit…a being with. 9

The camera sees a character watching but by doing this it thinks the character; it affects his
point of view. The camera maintains a distance but it is also at one with the character. It is a
split of vision that never reaches the fixed state of defining the subject and the object of the
gaze, meaning that the camera does not identify as a pure subject where the character is
reduced to an object of its gaze. The semi-subjective camera then becomes an index of an
unidentified other that watches with the character. John Orr calls it a being with others. 10 It
becomes a denotative act of the breakdown of the notion of an autonomous agency and the
rise of a space where subjectivity is constantly affective and affected.

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Can we not claim that in Voyage to Cythera this being with others is felt not only through the
semi-subjective camera shot but also through every character who sees himself/herself acting
as another? In the film the obliteration of the borders between reality and fiction results in the
return of each character as a double. After Alexandros witnesses the ongoing audition we see
him walking into a set of a café where all the actors from the film inside the film are resting.
When later on in the narrative each actor returns as a character in Alexandros’ film, it is
almost impossible to pin them down consciously into this initial sequence. At the first
viewing of Voyage to Cythera, when Spyros makes his entrance uttering “It’s me”, we as
spectators cannot help but feel a strong sense of amazement since it is only then that the
signification of the previous audition is revealed. The return often recurs in a more subtle
way as in the sequence where Spyros is reunited with his old partisan friend. It is almost
impossible to relate him to the actor who was complaining that his coat was too big for him
in the previous café sequence.

During the final port episode Alexandros stands in front of a mirror. He stands immobile
while the camera records both him and his reflection in the mirror together with the ongoing
action that occurs off screen. The workers are celebrating. It is inside the mirror that Voula
appears standing parallel to her brother and delivers the lines that she as an actress was
reading from a script in the café sequence at the beginning of the film. It is as if the narrative
were being ruptured in order to deliver an uncanny effect. The music that the workers are
playing is the same boogie that the leftist youth dace to in the 1946 New Year’s sequence in
The Travelling Players. The boogie was covered in a version with alternative lyrics ridiculing
General Scobie. The song was used as a weapon in the collision of the leftist and the fascist
groups. In Voyage to Cythera, the music reappears, this time with no lyrics. The dialectics of
the image bring forward the dynamics of a past force in contrast to a hollow present. Voula
seals the reflexivity of the shot: “There are times when I discover with terror and a sense of
relief that I do not believe in anything. Then I come back to my body. It is the only thing that
reminds me that I am still alive.” Previously we had seen her having sexual intercourse with a
sailor. It is a scene that Kolovos notes as crudely misogynist. Kolovos also notes that Voula’s

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hatred for her father is not justified and becomes another signifier of Angelopoulos’ negative
predisposition against her character. 11 Yet we should remember that Voula is not a character
in a psychological drama. Her function as Spyros’ daughter coincides with her being a type in
a familiar Angelopoulian manner for a wider social identity. Both Alexandros and Voula
stand for a disillusioned generation and while Alexandros is more affectionate towards
Spyros, Voula expresses a deeper rupture between her generation and that of her father’s. Let
us not forget that in The Travelling Players, Elektra gives us a reverse image of male
voyeurism when she relentlessly forces an Italian soldier to stand naked in front of the
camera, thus turning him into an object of the gaze. And it is Voula who returns from inside
the mirror in order to deliver the film’s most dramatic lines.

With Voyage to Cythera Angelopoulos introduces what he called his Trilogy of Silence. All
the figures are drifting in solitude and frustration. In his first trilogy, Angelopoulos saw
history as a perpetual movement of power between two poles, the Right and the Left. The
identification of power at one pole, the Right, leaves room only for the aftermath of silence,
which is inscribed in the form of the film, for example in the way that the long takes of
corridors and shots lingering on the framing of closed doors in Days of ’36 signified the state
of censorship under which the film was produced.

Angelopoulos remains faithful to the long take. The whole film consists of 74 takes.
However, there are fewer sequence shots, just as there is a reduction in the collisions of social
groups. The collision is reduced to the encounter between Spyros and Antonis in the village.
The dynamics of history have ceased and all that is left from the Brechtian singing of The
Travelling Players and Megalexandros is Antonis’ military song, which he sings with a
broken voice. Spyros remains silent. This is a moving image rather than a sober, politically-
charged tableau. Angelopoulos also abstains from the use of large tableaux shots and evolves
into an aesthetic of smaller episodes that contain two or three cuts for each sequence. The
camera also gets much closer to the filmed subjects. Although Angelopoulos does not go as
far as to frame the actors in an extreme close up, the camera will often evolve from an
establishing shot to a mid close up of the character.

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When Spyros is confined at the port and after the attempt to send him away on the Russian
ship has failed, we find him together with Katerina at an empty warehouse. The old man is
standing calling out to death. Starting from a long shot, the camera moves in towards him
performing a double circle where Spyros is framed in mid close up. Without a cut, the camera
then withdraws back into a long shot where we see Spyros from behind. This is the only
circular movement of the camera in the film but unlike previous films the movement here
takes the opposite direction. Instead of framing a visual periphery with the camera panning
from a fixed centre, it now concentrates on a fixed centre with the camera gazing in from the
outside. It is a movement that marks the shift towards introspection in the second period of
Angelopoulos. The shift will incorporate the close up but not as a separate fragment: it will
be included in the same space confines of a larger tracking shot.

This change of direction implies an immersion into a more melancholic minimalism. The
solitary wandering of the alienated hero reduces the movement of large groups; the collective
praxis of weddings and ceremonies gives way to more personal rituals like the welcoming of
Spyros by his relatives in Athens and the cutting of the bread when they are about to dine
inside their stone house in the village. The permeating colour here is blue, but its shades are
very different from the cold light blue undertones of The Hunters. It is a much deeper blue
that becomes yet another signifier of melancholia. Finally, the composition of the image
remains elliptical as in the previous films and the use of telephoto lens allows the extreme
long shots, that are now more limited, to have a clear visual field where the depth is rendered
flat as if everything were occuring on the same plane. This is the case when the villagers are
approaching on tractors from the far background during the public sale of the land and also
for the shots taken outside Spyros’ stone house while the police are looking for him after his
hut has been burned down.

So why “Voyage to Cythera”? Cythera is the name of a Greek island, but the only time that
the name Cythera appears in the film is on a message left on Alexandros’ answering machine.
The island, together with another two destinations, appears to be a possible location for the

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film shoot. It was Vassilis Rafailidis who pointed out that Voyage to Cythera alludes to
Watteau’s painting Embarquement pour Cythere, which was painted early in the eighteenth
century (1717). Rafailidis however, associates the painting with the ascending French middle
class:

Watteau had every reason to be ridiculously optimistic: the middle class had not yet taken
power and was lively and high-spirited because it had started to dream of its embarkation to
Cythera. However in the middle of the 19th century, Baudelaire…discovered that all the ships
for Cythera had sunk. The Invitation to a Voyage is an ironic reading of Watteau’s painting…
(Baudelaire) was the first to realise that Cythera exists only as a synonym of utopia. 12

The painting is mistakenly identified with the middle class. I would read the painting as a
Rococo work and see the landscape imagery as part of a feudal milieu. It is not the upcoming
bourgeoisie that dreams of its embarkation to Cythera, yet the remark that Baudelaire sees
Cythera as an unattainable utopia is crucial. We should also remember that Thomas Moore’s
Utopia is set on an island. Maybe it is for this island that the old couple on the raft set sail in
the final take. The signification though has changed. Utopia is reduced to asserting one’s will
in the face of death. The old couple deliver Eros as an image of melancholia that drifts on the
open sea. The island is absent.

1
Fredric Jameson, ‘The Past as History, the Future as Form’ in The Last Modernist-The Films of Theo
Angelopoulos, ed. Andrew Horton, Flicks Books, Wiltshire, 1997, p.88
2
See also Nikos Kolovos, Thodoros Angelopoulos, Aigokeros, Athens, 1990, p. 149.
3
Slavoj Žižek, ‘The Myth of Postmodernity’ in Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? :five interventions in the
(mis)use of a notion, Verso, London, 2001, p. 29.
4
Pier Paolo Pasolini, ‘The Cinema of Poetry’ in Heretical Empiricism, Bloomington, Indianapolis, 1988, p.169.

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5
John Orr, ‘A Cinema of Poetry’ in Post-War Cinema and Modernity, ed. John Orr and Olga Taxidou,
Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2000, p.134.
6
Fabrice Revault d’Allonnes also makes reference to Fellini though without mentioning 8½. See Fabrice
Revault d Allonnes,’Ο Ελληνικός Κύκλος’ in Θόδωρος Αγγελόπουλος, ed. Ειρήνη Στάθη, Φεστιβάλ
Κινηματογράφου Θεσσαλονίκης Εκδόσεις Καστανιώτη, Αθήνα, 2000, p. 278.
7
Walter Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller’ in Illuminations, Fontana Press, London, 1992, p.84.
8
Walter Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller’ in Illuminations, ibid., p.89.
9
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1-The Movement Image, The Athlone Press, London, 1986, pp.73-74.
10
John Orr, ‘A Cinema of Poetry’, ibid. p.135.
11
Nikos Kolovos, Thodoros Angelopoulos, ibid, p. 157.
12
Vassilis Rafailides, ‘Ταξίδι στα Κύθηρα’ in Ελληνικός Κινηματογράφος – Κριτική 1965-1995, Αιγόκερως,
Αθήνα, 1995, p.74.

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194
 THE BEEKEEPER / Ο ΜΕΛΙΣΣΟΚΟΜΟΣ

The film depicts the journey of a retired teacher who on the day of his daughter’s
wedding in a rural town in the North decides to leave his married life and venture
southwards to take up his old profession as a beekeeper. While on the road he meets
a young girl who manages to arouse passions in him he thought were long buried.
The film turns into a portrayal of an existential angst where two worlds collide. The
beekeeper is an old leftwing activist and the girl a drifter oblivious of the past. The
beekeeper’s journey to the South maps a clash between memory and a perpetual
present of amnesia. The landscape gradually changes into a mental geography that
slowly prepares the beekeeper for his final exit.

The Beekeeper was shot in 1986, three years after Voyage to Cythera. European film
festivals like Venice and Cannes had by then recognised Angelopoulos as the most
prominent Greek director of the period. After The Hunters, Angelopoulos co-
produced all his films with international subsidies, mainly from Italy and France. His
international appeal also guaranteed the full support of the Greek Film Centre, which
was responsible for all national film production. The Centre was a cooperation that
belonged to the wider public sector and was supervised initially by the Ministry of
Industry and then by the Ministry of Culture. Founded in the late 1970s, the Centre
gradually became the exclusive producer for all films with artistic intentions that
were made in Greece after this period. It should be noted that the Centre was
responsible for the production of films that due to their artistic aspirations would
never have got made through private funding. The major disadvantages were that
film directors became prey to networking and lack of proper subsidies.

By 1986, Greek cinema had turned into a battlefield with directors often fighting
against each other and simultaneously criticising the Centre for the distribution of its
annual budget. The promise of a New Wave that erupted in the seventies when new
directors helped each other to produce low budget films had turned into an unwritten

195
war between directors and a love-hate relationship with the Centre. The euphoria of
the post-junta period had given way to a lingering misery hanging over the cinematic
scenery in Greece. One of the main targets of discontent was the junior minister of
Culture, Manos Zaharias, who was often accused of imposing absolute control over
the Centre. 1 Whether these accusations are true is debatable. One thing is certain
though: Zaharias did attempt but unfortunately failed to establish a National
Academy of Cinematography. Whether an Academy would have improved the
annual budget spend on cinematography is also debatable. What is not debatable is
that the conditions in which filmmakers were working at this time were more than
severe. Limited state subsidies, together with the Greek Film Centre’s lack of
autonomy, were two factors that held Greek filmmakers hostage. Most filmmakers
had to fund their own films that were being co-produced with the Centre. Many sold
their property in order to raise funds for the production of their films. Others were
ruthlessly neglected. Alexis Damianos, whose film Evdokia (1970) is considered by
many Greek critics to be one of the best Greek films ever made, was unable to make
another film for the next twenty five years. After having turned into a recluse,
Damianos mortgaged his own house and eventually returned for one last time with
his epic Ηνίοχος/Chariot (1995), a film fresco of modern Greece from the years of
the civil war until the year of the film’s production.

The Beekeeper was a French-Greek co-production involving the Greek Film Centre,
M.K.2 Productions (Paris), the Greek National Network, R.A.I. and Angelopoulos.
Angelopoulos cast Marcello Mastroianni in the role of the beekeeper and thus
achieved wide international attention even before the film was released. Mastroianni
insisted that he did not want to be dubbed and spoke all his dialogue in Greek. The
film was shot on location in Florina in the north of Greece, as well as in Ioannina and
smaller rural towns in the south like Loutraki and Galaxidi. It also included a few
locations in Athens. Angelopoulos shot a feature of 140 minutes that was screened at
the Venice Film Festival in 1986. Under pressure from the French producer, he had
to cut the film down to 120 minutes for its theatrical release.

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A journey to the south.

The main character in the film is called Spyros. He bears the same name as the father
in Voyage to Cythera. Both characters are signs of the past. Yet Angelopoulos here
takes a different line than the one taken in the previous film. Here, he frames the life
of an ex-leftwing activist who grew up in a post-civil war environment when the
Communists had already been defeated. As Vasilis Rafailides points out, the
beekeeper becomes a representative of those leftwing activists who had to
compromise in order to continue to live within Greek national borders. 2 The old man
in Voyage to Cythera was the living embodiment of the struggles of the Left during
the Greek civil war. This narrative placed him in a position different to that of the
owner of a piece of land. Spyros was tied to the land not as part of an abstract
ecological narrative for the preservation of nature but mostly as a vital part of a
struggle against the separation of the local community from an organic relationship
with the land. The obsessive framings of empty rocky landscapes become
testimonies of the increasing urbanisation of Greece that is turning rural areas into
abandoned spaces. The characters walk in and out of frames which foreground run-
down stone houses and the rocky landscape. But as I have already demonstrated this
is not an objective landscape. It carries the aura of the disillusioned protagonist
whose perception is reflected in the mise en scene. In a similar manner, Spyros the
beekeeper is another memory vessel on a journey through a wintry Greece. In the
aftermath of the crisis of the ideologies of the Left depicted in Megalexandros, the
Trilogy of Silence brings forth an on-going journey that was launched in Voyage to
Cythera. The beekeeper becomes Angelopoulos’ second voyager.

Spyros is introduced as a lower middle class teacher whose daughter is getting

married in the north of Greece, where he lives with his wife. Some friends, relatives
and a number of ex-colleagues are present at the wedding. The setting is of a typical
low key wedding. Spyros leads a quiet life. Played by Marcello Mastroianni, the
character is one generation younger than the old man in the previous film. The old
man in Voyage carried the identity of the partisan whose presence threatened the
arrangements forged between the rising petit bourgeoisie and the new state of private

197
investment. That Spyros refused to hand over his land to a company who were
planning to build a ski resort on it. The beekeeper on the other hand is of no threat to
anyone. He is a well-respected member of his small society in the north. Despite this,
on the day of his daughter’s wedding he realises that this is not enough

The film introduces his voiceover in the first shot of the film. The voice describes the
dance of the queen bee in a fairytale manner while the camera frames an empty
wedding table out in the rain. This is a memory sequence. We see the table in the rain
and we hear two voices that belong to Spyros and his daughter as a child. A cut
introduces us to the interior of Spyros’ house. We realise that all the guests had left
the wedding table and moved inside due to the rain. Nothing suggests a revolutionary
past except for the meeting in the hospital with his terminally ill companion halfway
through the film.

In his essay on The Beekeeper, Vassilis Rafailides points out that after the civil war
the only way for an ex-leftwing activist to attain work in the public sector was to sign
a humiliating statement of remorse. 3 As a teacher Spyros works in the public sector,
therefore it can be assumed that he has signed such a petition. His adult life starts
with a defeat and a compromise that seems to creep up on him on the day of his
daughter’s wedding. What Spyros gained was a family and a job as a teacher in a
small rural town, the two elements that establish him as a member of the petit
bourgeoisie. Now however, he is retiring from his post as a teacher, his daughter is
going away with her new husband and his son is moving back to Athens. The
identities Spyros draws from both family and work are annulled on the same day.

After the wedding Spyros lifts his daughter in his arms and sings a lullaby before he
passes her over to the husband who is an army officer. The image is rich in
symbolism. It is as if Spyros the ex-revolutionary who saw himself as part of the
flow of an international movement is forced to pass over his daughter to the most
apersonally identified member of the state, the officer. The man in the uniform is a
sign. He comes to join the Angelopoulian plane of men in uniforms whose function
in the image is autonomous. As an officer, he carries with him the identity of the

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state and of oppression. The husband has no psychological function. He does not
even utter a word. On a realistic level the image might seem problematic. The
dialectic drawn from the Angelopoulian hero facing yet another signifier of state
nationalism reduces the daughter to an object charged with an exchange value. The
girl becomes part of a ritual that deprives her of her agency. She acquires
connotations of pure innocence and passivity. Yet the shot here moves from the level
of realism to that of allegory. The daughter stands for Greece and the act signifies the
malice inflicted by the continuous presence of the army in the history of modern
Greek politics. The beekeeper passes over his daughter to the officer. It is a moment
of grief. The shot is reflected by another sequence later on in the narrative where we
see Spyros walking in the central square of a rural town swarming with soldiers.

The film oscillates between two poles. It moves from a level of pure seeing to that of
an allegorical, almost mythical narrative. In the sequence described above, the image
serves as a stand-in for an idea. The film, however, also includes a state of pure
seeing where the main character and by extension the viewer perceives a flux of
material phenomena that resist a rigid symbolisation, meaning that the attempt to
make them meaningful does not transcend the affect generated through the encounter
with matter. We can see this clearly in what I believe is the most striking image in
the film. Spyros becomes a stranger to his past identity as husband and father. After
the wedding he takes a long walk over the bridge next to his house until he reaches
over towards a blossom tree which hangs over the river. We see him next to the tree
standing still and facing the river. This is the second time that the Angelopoulian
hero is framed together with a tree. In Voyage to Cythera we saw Katrakis walking
towards his hut with a huge painted blue tree at his back which immediately
transformed the objective landscape into a spatial field that reflected the
psychological state of the hero. The melancholic blue signified the world seen
through the eyes of both the old man and his son Alexandros, since the film we see is
the film Alexandros is making about his father.

In The Beekeeper the symbolic function of the tree comes not from its outlandish
colour but from the time it takes to be revealed in the long shot, and from the contrast

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between its fully blossomed branches and the wintry landscape that surrounds it. We
should not speak though of a dialectic between two pre-cinematic concepts. It is the
movement of the camera and the immanent rhythm of the shot that transforms the
tree from a static conceptual symbol to a dynamic entity of the sequence shot. What
this means is that the tree does not have a pre-cinematic signification that the director
merely includes inside the mise en scene as if he is adding a symbol taken from a
dictionary of signs. Spyros approaches the tree but we see no reaction on his part.
The sequence does not offer a cause and effect relationship between the man and the
final revelation of the tree. The tree is revealed by the camera but Spyros does not
react. Yet its presence is somehow majestic. What does that signify? The sequence
refuses a rigid symbolism. The slow movement of the camera free from the
restrictions of a plot delivers the rhythm of a material world that is not superseded by
the realm of the concept. What the tree symbolises – an image of duration that goes
beyond history - appears on the same level of observation as bearing witness to the
exposition of pure matter. It is as if Angelopoulos is not only interested in the tree as
an idea for something else but also attempts to bring out the tree-ness of a tree, its
material substance. The final shot of the tree renders an image of time which goes
beyond the motive perception of man, hence its meditative resonance. The director
frames the landscape not in a realist aesthetic where the camera ceases to exist for the
real world to come through, as Bazin would put it. Instead, a long tracking shot
reveals the presence of the apparatus as a subjective entity. Instead of an objective
realism and a crude metaphor, the camera reveals the world as it appears in its gaze.

The theme of The Beekeeper is essentially that of divorce. It is the divorce of the
Angelopoulian hero from his society and what Angelopoulos named the silence of
Eros. 4 The narrative is divided into three episodes. Each episode, which ends with a
scene at a beehive, marks Spyros’ attempt to reconcile himself with life. Each time
he arrives at the beehives Spyros is framed in solitude. Then the voiceover of his
fragmented thoughts reveals the emotional vacuum he is in. In The Travelling Players
the moment where a character faces the camera is a moment either of confession or
didactic narrative. The development of the plot is suspended and the character steps
out of the action in order to comment on the historical context. The characters face

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the camera and look straight into the lens. The testimonies function as autonomous
texts and provide the dynamics of a group. Still there is one testimony where a
character consciously avoids the camera’s gaze. The deed of signing a petition of
remorse raises so great a sense of guilt that the character, Pylades, is unable to meet
the camera’s gaze. He does it just for a second at the end of his testimony when he
concludes that his companion was left half dead but had not signed and it is as if he
wished to be in his place.

Spyros is framed three times in a similar manner. The third framing includes his
suicide. In the previous two we see him staring into a vacuum. He says: “If somebody
asked who I am all I could say is that I have lived here for the past twenty years.”
These are his thoughts at the second beehive before his final attempt to establish
contact with the young drifter. The trauma in The Travelling Players is not a matter
of introspection. The members of the troupe are representations of group dynamics
and their testimonies take the form of a claim: the claim of history on behalf of those
who fought fascism. History is brought to the present, that is, in a post-junta
democratic regime, where the issue of the so-called national division is to be
resolved. In The Beekeeper this resolution seems to be of no significance. This has
been more than evident in Voyage to Cythera. Both characters in these two films
appear as relics of a past that has lost its force in the present. In the current film
Spyros and his two friends also represent the three roads taken by the popular left in
the eighties. Spyros has been absorbed into the normality of a petit bourgeois
environment; one friend has turned into an owner of capital and the second, played
by Serge Reggiani, is in hospital, half mad. The latter, having lost touch with the
present, still quotes songs of rebellion. We see him speaking only in French. Spyros’
old friend has lost his native language and that for Angelopoulos is a sign of an
alienating isolation. The Reggiani character is reminiscent of the poet in The
Travelling Players who, although he recognises defeat, cannot move beyond the
trauma of loss. Close to the end of the film, in a sequence with full dramatic
resonance, we witness the poet ferociously reciting Katsaros’ poem Kata Sadoukaion
(Κατά Σαδουκκαίων). As the director notes, these characters where ‘digested’ by
history. 5 Unable to reconcile themselves to reality, they went mad.

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Spyros did not go mad yet he is tied by a permeating melancholia that leaves him
fixed in silence. Like the old man in Voyage to Cythera he only speaks in sporadic
elliptical sentences. However, The Beekeeper is the only film where Angelopoulos
uses inner monologue and gives access to the thoughts of the character. The delving
into the man’s psyche however reveals nothing. While on the road Spyros recounts
the stops he has to make at the beehives. Once he reaches the second group of
beehives we then witness him claiming that it is only his material being that accounts
for his presence in life. His thoughts are reduced to a statement of apathy. There is
not much more that we get from his actual words. In Voyage to Cythera the old man
kept repeating the phrase “rotten apple”. The phrase remained suspended,
unconnected to any conscious dramatic monologue. We can see the same function in
The Beekeeper. The character’s inner motives remain at a distance from the director.
Spyros does not release a stream of consciousness-like narrative or a fragmented
story in the face of the silent other as in a Bergman film. A close-up in Bergman
would be the trigger for a relentless dive into the character’s psyche, where the
subject exposes its fragmented ego through the deliverance of a soliloquy. The face
could alternatively be fixed in silence. It then becomes a signifier of an inner space
that is brought out into the open through the words of another character who stands
either at the depth of field or out of frame.

In The Beekeeper the director refuses to concentrate on the face of the main character.
Instead Mastroianni is framed in a long shot that reveals the whole of his body. The
three shots taken at the beehives suspend the unravelling of the plot. All three portray
a man in solitude among the barren hills. We could claim that Angelopoulos in his
second period resembles Antonioni in the 1960s in that they both reveal the
psychology of the individual through the exploration of landscape. But while the
latter scans the space formed between the hero and the modern city, where history
does not play a significant role, Angelopoulos plays on the dialectic of past and
present. Angelopoulos has one foot in the past, trying to trace the remains of
collective subjectivity in a bewildering alienating present. Spyros is a sign of the
past, unlike Monica Vitti in Antonioni’s Red Desert (1964) or L’Eclisse (1962)

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where her past identity is not as important as her present encounter with a
hallucinatory industrialisation of space.

In the Beekeeper Spyros travels towards the south of Greece. The film turns into a
road movie where images of petrol stations, cement buildings and cooperative
enterprises are juxtaposed with images of rundown neo-classical houses, decaying
villages and finally an old cinema whose entrance lies next to a railroad from where
we see a train passing at full speed. This is the last grand metaphor of the film. It is
an image of speed contrasting with the decaying stillness of the old cinema house.
From that we get two different types of movement. One describes the external
motion of an object in space; the other signifies inner movement generated through
the encounter of the viewer with the work of art. For Spyros it is as if this movement
has been suspended. Inside the cinema we find him on stage with the girl. The empty
white screen behind them becomes yet another image of rupture. Spyros returns to
the bees for the third time. Each of the three shots at the beehives is a direct
encounter with the absurd. Each encounter with the camera ends the futile attempt to
establish communion both with his previous life (the meetings with his daughter and
his friends) and with his hopes for the future (the meetings with the drifter).

The film is set entirely in the present and the narrative progresses towards its
resolution in a linear chronological pattern. There are no flashbacks and the image
does not entail the time transitions either of The Travelling Players or The Hunters. It
is also far removed from Voyage to Cythera where the film splits into an
indiscernible image of an actual and a virtual world seen through the eyes of
Alexandros. Here Angelopoulos attempts to increase the distance between him and
the main character yet the film retains a semi autobiographical mode. The main
narrative drive becomes that of the love chase where we see Spyros becoming fixated
with the young drifter as she continuously reappears throughout the journey.
Angelopoulos now comes closer to his characters with his camera, as he did in
Voyage to Cythera. There is no excessive use of the sequence shot, for example to
incorporate successive circular movements with the camera. Extreme long shots are
almost absent. The duration of the shot is much shorter in relation to the Trilogy of

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History and the framing alternates between frontal and diagonal perspectives while
retaining the formula of the observer. As in the previous film the long take shifts
from a strictly parallel framing to the action to a vertical movement towards the
filmed subject. We see this at the kiosk sequence where the camera tracks from a
wide establishing shot to a medium close up of Spyros’ hand as it is bitten by the
girl. The same function reappears in the last shot of the film.

Although the plot revolves around the beekeeper and the drifter, we are also
presented with episodic intervals where Spyros meets up with his wife in Athens,
attends a reunion with old friends, goes back to the house of his birth and meets his
older daughter. These episodes work on a parallel level to that which deals with the
futile love chase of the drifter. Each episode relates to the character’s being, rather
than functioning as a narrative device that moves the action forward. One becomes
almost oblivious of the girl while Spyros returns to his birth house or when he meets
up with his friends from the past. In these last two episodes the film reflects a double
return. The first marks the personal return of the hero to a space with which he once
enjoyed an organic relationship. The desolate neoclassical house once provided a
clear and coherent story of the world for the hero. Angelopoulos frames Mastroianni
from outside the house as he opens the shutters of a window in one of the rooms. The
frame remains still and we are left witnessing Mastroianni as he looks out off frame
to the right. Jan Garbarek’s saxophone delivers a melody written by Karaindrou
underlining the hero’s sense of nostalgia. The return offers a moment of personal
bliss and Mastroianni is presented through a double framing effect. Framed both by
the window and the camera the voyager turns somehow into a tableau vivant. Time
becomes suspended and the image no longer belongs to the present. It becomes a
portrait that breaks away from the flow of events to evoke a sense of time
remembered.

The second marks the return of History. Spyros meets his old friend Nikos who is
now a manager in a BMW sales department. Together they sneak into a hospital in
order to visit their old friend, played by Sergio Reggiani, who is terminally ill. A
nurse interrupts the short visit and Reggiani starts signalling a message in morse code

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by hitting the back of his hand on his bedside table when Spyros and Nikos are about
to leave. Nikos asks what the meaning of the gesture is and Spyros replies that this is
how political prisoners communicated through their cells. The morse code, like the
whistle language in Voyage to Cythera, delivers an underground moment of
recognition. In both films this moment of recognition stands out as nostalgic yet it is
simultaneously disturbing. It reflects the affect of companionship but it is also a
reminder of isolation. It is the isolation of the historical subjects that were spat out by
the grand sweeps of history.

A simple cut finds all three friends from the hospital now on a beach. Through an
absurd escape from the hospital that we never witness, the three friends are
transported to the beach and it is the first time that a feeling of being with others
makes its way into the narrative. It is short-lived, for it is but a memory episode. Yet
the meeting comes in contrast with the wedding that took place at the opening of the
film. The wedding feast is framed as somehow sorrowful, while an unembellished
meeting turns into a feast of joy, albeit momentary. The logical sequence of the shots
gives way to a poetic license that presents an absurd escape to the beach as an
antidote to an absurd present. The three characters escape to the sea. The nostalgia of
youth will unite them into a little act of free play. Nikos is about to dive into the sea
when Reggiani exclaims: “It is in these places that we dreamed that we could change
the world. I was digested by history.” Spyros never replies and the camera is left
framing the dialectic between the raving sick man and the surrounding landscape. It
is the dialectics drawn from the relic of a dream as it stands against the reality of an
massive architectural landscape of cement, a monstrosity of the so-called Building
Reconstruction that was launched in the fifties and continued until the late eighties
turning every single city in mainland Greece into a cement block.

Spyros stands between the sick man and his capitalist friend. He refuses to find a
resolution in an individualistic accumulation of wealth or to cling to a past ideal that
has lost all touch with the present. Spyros remains silent. The breakdown of his petit
bourgeois identity marks the return of an unidentified angst. The lust for a new
beginning brings him to the girl. Yet this new beginning is not possible. Spyros’ lust

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turns into a desperate attempt to hang on to life. It is an attempt accompanied by
force. The attempt to make love to his wife when they meet in Athens is really an
attempt to bury his lust for the drifter. Spyros forces himself on his wife and then
stops halfway through the act. In the eyes of his childhood friends, the woman he
married was a prize to be attained. If we were to see in the beekeeper yet another
return of the Odysseus pattern, like Nikos Kolovos does, 6 then now it seems that
Odysseus has the same attitude to Penelope’s courtiers. It remains ambiguous if
Spyros ever loved his wife or his marriage was driven by the impulse of the prize.
Angelopoulos’ attitude towards women in this particular film can easily be dismissed
as somehow stereotypical and lacking subjectivity. Spyros’ wife could be seen as an
archetypal woman who endures the male wandering of the hero. Yet contrary to this
type of criticism, Angelopoulos is cruel mostly with his main character who is seen
mistreating his wife and forcing himself on her. It is a cruelty that permeates not only
him but also takes over the girl drifter when she is framed in the darkness copulating
with a soldier in a hotel room while Spyros is lying on the bed next to them.

The drifter

The drifter shares a fundamental aspect with the beekeeper. They are both outsiders.
However, in other ways they are opposites. She is young and does not carry the
burden of history. She might be its product but she is indifferent to the fact. She
carries no sense of memory. What she does have is a sense of negation for her social
environment. Both characters function under a perspective of divorce. They are both
in search of redemption. For Spyros the death of ideologies has brought him to a
search for the body. But the drifter, as Vasilis Rafailides points out, is one who is
aimlessly moving up and down highways. 7 She does not have any purpose and her
freedom is not invested in moving from one state of affairs to another. All that she
has is a wedding dress she carries around in her rucksack. The presence of the dress
has allegorical connotations. It can be seen as marking the incommensurable gap
between two different generations who have lost touch with each other. Yet it can

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also be seen as a stand in for a generation that found itself torn between a lust for
adventure and a petit bourgeois morality which dictated stability and safety.

We can see the same allegorical function in the pop song that the girl puts on a
jukebox while Spyros makes a stop at a gas station. It is not its American origin
which is at issue here. The leftist youth in The Travelling Players choose an American
boogie in order to use it against the polkas that have been identified with the fascists.
The song there becomes an embodiment of struggle, of a material transcendence. Its
use cannot be separated from the particularities of the social milieu in which it
appears. Now the song appears as a consumable object. It is a random pop song and
its function is to heighten yet another of the film’s metaphors: the rupture between
Spyros’ generation and that of the girl. In Wenders’ Alice in the Cities (1974) the
main character, played by Rudger Vogler, approaches a gas station where we see a
young boy sitting on a chair next to a jukebox, listening to Canned Heat’s On the
Road Again. This is a Deleuzian optical image: it serves no narrative function yet it
stimulates emotion, or what Deleuze would call affect. 8 It could be seen as a moment
of recognition where the thirty-year-old protagonist feels affectionate for a child who
is listening to the same music that he identified with. Vogler never enters the shot nor
do we ever see a reaction shot of him. The use of the blues and rock’n’roll in
Wenders is integral to his cinema. It is where his characters find the home that the
modern Federal Republic of Germany cannot provide. The music turns into a point
of rupture with the generation of their fathers - the generation that according to the
directors of New German Cinema is to be held partly responsible for the rise of
Nazism. However, that was in the mid seventies. In The Beekeeper ten years later the
use of pop music lacks any sort of authorial signature, unlike the Canned Heat
anthem. It is neither a product of collective imagination neither a subjective view of
the world. It is a mass-produced industrial object that functions as a carpet for the
dance of the queen bee.

The use of the dance of the bee queen metaphor is integral to the film. It appears as a
narrated story in the opening credits and then Spyros’ encounter with the girl is
filtered through it. The dance is a natural ritual performed in the society of bees.

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Angelopoulos uses it as a metaphor and elevates the film to the realm of allegory.
Angelopoulos sees the dissolution of a sense of a community where the girl
represents a younger generation that is not only unable to form a connection with the
generation of the civil war but also lacks a sense of political and social perspective
for the future. The girl is portrayed as an exhausted drifter, wandering up and down
the highways. The final act of the film is played onstage in front of an empty cinema
screen. The couple enters an old rural cinema house in order to find shelter for the
night. The cinema is empty with only the projectionist present. He is an old friend of
Spyros. The projectionist exclaims that not many people visit the cinema these days.
He shows them to the cinema room and the couple climbs up the stage where they
will spend the night. The projectionist then leaves. The couple lies on the floor of the
stage. Behind them is a huge empty screen. At a certain moment Spyros throws
himself at the girl. This attempt to make love fails. We never see the couple
copulating and Spyros is never seen without his clothes on. As we witness Spyros
forcing himself onto the girl the narrative cuts to Spyros sitting in the auditorium
staring at the stage. The next shot is of the girl onstage lying naked with her back to
the camera. Here Angelopoulos uses for the first and only time the technique of
shot/reverse shot. Its singular use, as Fréderic Sabouraud points out, works towards a
sense of estrangement rather than functioning as a standard device of continuity
editing connecting an objective shot with a subjective point of view. 9 The effect here
is that Spyros is watching himself, his final attempt to do sex which has ended in
futility.

The girl leaves him, heading back on the road which in this case is nowhere. She will
probably keep on to her white dress trying to materialise a false narrative of
redemption through the search of a prince. Spyros is alone. He commits suicide by
kicking the beehives upside down thus releasing the bees that swarm around his
body. The director comments that it should not be seen as an act of despair. It is as if
Spyros is sacrificing himself to nature. 10 The film does not end framing Spyros’ dead
body but instead the camera zooms in on his hand that is taping on the ground. The
pulsating hand is sending a message the way that his ex partisan friend did in the
hospital. Whether Spyros is in sorrow or despair is not important though. Spyros

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refuses to forget and take comfort in a static identity. The capitalist friend who has
come to terms with life, a chorus that is reduced to a numb pack of soldiers, the
cement buildings, the public spaces of national commemoration, these are the static
signs that are juxtaposed to his silent journey.

The journey brings Spyros at the point of departure from life. His suicide is not a
loss. As the bearer of memory Spyros refuses to digest history. We could claim that
Angelopoulos again lies close to the dialectical thought of Benjamin and the latter’s
idea of present time where the object of the past is preserved in the present. 11 In
Benjamin’s image of the Angelus Novus the angel moves towards the future with his
eyes fixed in the past. This is a movement that does not go through the traditional
dialectical formula of thesis antithesis synthesis. The past is not annihilated for the
establishment of a new present but rather persists in an image of historical
contamporaneity. It is an image where the past endures while refusing to redeem the
present of past miscarriages. Benjamin opposes this perception of a present that
refuses consolation to an idea of a present that redeems the past under false symbolic
closures.

The public spaces of commemoration for the dead German soldiers of the Great War
is one example where Benjamin saw the past being sealed into false symbolic
closures. The elevation of each individual death to the realm of collective sacrifice
for the nation hides the true object of the past which is the absurdity of death.
Against the false symbolic closures in the present, that is, against the way public
spaces of commemoration do hide the absurdity of death under the idea of
nationalism, Benjamin hails the utopian, repetitive rituals of remembrance that refuse
consolation. 12 They are utopian in a literal sense meaning that they occupy no space:
they are running repetitively in the mind and they are private. As Martin Jay points
out in relation to Benjamin’s refusal to mourn:

Rather than constructing spatial topoi of commemoration, those

lieux de mémoire that functioned to solidify national identity in the
present and justify the alleged sacrifices made in its name, the

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 explicitly u-topian – in the literal sense of no place - and ritualised
remembrance of past miscarriages intransigently resist current
consolation. 13

Just as Benjamin refused to attribute symbolic connotations to the death of the

soldiers in the Great War, so the film does not provide a symbolic closure to the
death of the beekeeper. What remains is the memory of the dead body signalling for
the sake of communication without sacrificing the individual souls for the collective
soul meaning the identification with a national or political rhetoric. Spyros is not a
symbol of the Left neither is he a representative persona of a social group. His
suicide is a refusal to let go of the past but it is also a call for the viewer to act
towards a being with others that is not ruled by an abstract ideal.

The beekeeper refuses to establish an absolute cause for his suicide; the past is not
reified either in monumental spaces or in the preservations of ideals. The past passes
through his mind like a film over and over. It is the film we are witnessing. The
Beekeeper like any film of Angelopoulos records a space where the spectator’s eye
comes in direct confrontation with a form that is build on long takes and where the
image is not subordinated to a rigid symbolic function. The duration of the shot
allows the viewer to invest his/her own emotions and thoughts in the image rather
than being driven towards a homogenous collective response. This is a principle that
returns in every film. The Beekeeper ends with the frame of a signalling hand as an
attempt to establish communication but the answer does not find its way on the
celluloid. The film does not look for an absolute truth but it rather fills the space with
the process of the journey where the object of the past is neither lost nor redeemed. It
rather becomes a haunting presence that sustains the pulsating hand of the beekeeper
in search of cine-accomplices, in search for communication. 14

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1
For a detailed discussion on the problems of Greek film production in the 1980s see Γιάννης
Σολδάτος, Ιστορία Ελληνικού Κινηματογράφου Τόμος Β’ 1967-1990, Αιγόκερως, Αθήνα 1999. pp.
226-227, 243-244, 279-283, 302-303.
2
Βασίλης Ραφαηλίδης, Ο Μελισσοκόμος in Ελληνικός Κινηματογράφος - Κριτική 1965-1995,
Αιγόκερως, Αθήνα, 1995, p.140.
3
Βασίλης Ραφαηλίδης, Ο Μελισσοκόμος , ibid. p.143.
4
See Νίκος Κολοβός, Θόδωρος Αγγελόπουλος, Αιγόκερως, Αθήνα, 1990, p. 161.
5
Theo Angelopoulos, unpublished interview with the author, July 2005.
6
See Νίκος Κολοβός, ‘Ο Οδυσσέας στη Χώρα των Νεκρών’ in Θόδωρος Αγγελόπουλος, ed. Ειρήνη
Στάθη, Φεστιβάλ Κινηματογράφου Θεσσαλονίκης – Εκδόσεις Καστανιώτη , Αθήνα, 2000, pp. 288-
290.
7
Βασίλης Ραφαηλίδης, Ο Μελισσοκόμος, ibid. p. 144.
8
For a further analysis on Deleuze’s notion of the optical image see the Introduction p. 19-20.
9
Fréderic Sabouraud, ‘Ο Δρόμος των Μελισσών’ in Θόδωρος Αγγελόπουλος, ed. Ειρήνη Στάθη,
Φεστιβάλ Κινηματογράφου Θεσσαλονίκης – Εκδόσεις Καστανιώτη , Αθήνα, 2000, p.284.
10
Theo Angelopoulos extract from an interview at the newspaper Τα Νέα included in Γιάννης
Σολδάτος, Ιστορία Ελληνικού Κινηματογράφου Τόμος Β’1967-1990 , Αιγόκερως, Αθήνα 1999, p. 331.
11
Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History in Illuminations, Fontana Press, London,
1992, p. 249.
12
See Martin Jay, ‘Against Consolation: Walter Benjamin and the Refusal to Mourn’ in War and
Remembrance in the Twentieth Century, ed. Jay Winter & Emmanuel Sivan, Cambridge University
Press, 2000, p. 231.
13
Martin Jay, Against consolation: Walter Benjamin and the refusal to mourn, ibid., p.231.
14
Angelopoulos uses the term σινέ-νοχοι in order to describe the kind of relationship he wants to share
with the audience of his films. The term is a phonetic play that stems from the conjunction of the
words cinema and synenohos (accomplice). See interview for Merchant Ivory in Θόδωρος
Αγγελόπουλος, ed. Ειρήνη Στάθη, Φεστιβάλ Κινηματογράφου Θεσσαλονίκης – Εκδόσεις Καστανιώτη
, Αθήνα, 2000, p. 202.

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212
 LANDSCAPE IN THE MIST / ΤΟΠΙΟ ΣΤΗΝ ΟΜΙΧΛΗ

Voula and Alexandros are two children living in Athens with their single mother.
They dream of meeting their father who according to their mother emigrated to
Germany and now lives there. The film starts with the two young protagonists as they
make their first attempt to catch a train in order to go and meet him. After an initial
delay they finally board a train without tickets, only to be apprehended by the police.
It emerges that there was never a father in Germany and that this was a fiction their
mother made up to protect the children. The children refuse to accept this and after a
dreamlike escape from the police station they continue their quest. While on the road
they hook up with a young man, Orestes, who is actually the mythical Orestes from
Angelopoulos’ The Travelling Players. The film becomes a journey where reality and
imagination mingle as the two children become emblems of hope in the face of a
disillusioning present. Germany becomes a metaphor for the search of an ideal and
the children seem to be the only agents moving towards redemption.

Landscape in the Mist is the last film in the Trilogy of Silence. According to the
director, it follows the silence of God or rather records the aftermath of this silence. 1
In a motif that permeates the whole trilogy, the director presents a landscape bereft of
any sense of culminated action and dramatic tension. It is as if the film were inviting
the viewer to witness a staging of what remains after the drama. The drama here is
equated with the clash between grand ideologies, a clash that was portrayed in The
Travelling Players and Megalexandros. This film presents an image which is split
between a journey traversed across a geographical plane and a sense of suspended
action where a sense of waiting becomes predominant. We are far from the material
lingering over the unravelling of the action within the sequence shot, the tool that
constructed the Trilogy of History where the dialectic of opposing groups was
presented through ritualistic movement in the mise en scene. Now the waiting
becomes more of a grand metaphor that permeates every shot. What we see in
Landscape in the Mist is the build up of a cinematic landscape from the point of view

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of two children in their attempt to trace their father in Germany. The film follows
two children on a journey that has Germany as a final destination. Yet the two young
protagonists believe that Germany lies on the other side of Greece’s northern border
and they simply have to catch a train to get there. The film becomes the second road
movie of Angelopoulos, in which we see the children jumping on and off the train
that they believe will lead them towards their goal. What was preconceived as a
linear road to redemption however turns out to be a journey of continuous disruptions
and multiple stations. Angelopoulos adopts a fairytale formula and blends it into his
long take aesthetic. The stations depict an industrial field as a landscape of threat
where the two children will encounter both the fairytale dragon and the redeeming
prince.

The fairytale formula allowed Landscape in the Mist to become Angelopoulos’ most
self-referential film to date. While Voyage to Cythera reflected the act of
filmmaking, Landscape in the Mist alludes to the director’s previous filmography.
The film marks the return of the travelling players together with different cinematic
signs from all seven of Angelopoulos’ previous films. Angelopoulos continues the
journey he sketched out with Voyage to Cythera. But now the alienated hero gives
way to the dream-like gaze of two children who are left wandering around rural
Greece. What the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze saw as the weakening of the
sensory-motor schema of the action narrative film through the road movie or the
ballad film (a narrative based on a journey), is what we can see as the starting point
of Landscape in the Mist. 2 The journey allows the construction of spaces both real
and imaginary where the quest is suspended. These are spaces built on the dialectic
of the old and the new, with the new standing both as an imaginary utopia and as a
menacing real industrial space. The two children are the new voyagers. The narrative
is split between the gaze of the children and that of the camera. At times the fairytale
manner of the narrative results from the innocent gaze of the two protagonists. That
in turn comes to meet the eye of the director who comes from a point of experience
and places before them images from the past. This is not a magic world of adventure
where fantasy can redeem an ugly present. Despite this, magic finds its way into a
bleak presence, through the character of Orestes. However, the children’s encounter

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with Orestes does not follow the predilections of a preconceived fate. He is not the
enlightened stranger of a quest fable. In the Travelling Players, Orestes was the
signifier of revolution. Now he returns, but it is not from the point of experience.
“Once I thought I knew where I was going…now I do not know anymore” he
exclaims during his first encounter with the children. Orestes cannot function as a
guide towards the children’s goal. Instead, they drive together through the
mountains, dance by the beach and wander round the square in Florina. It is these
moments which are significant in the film, for these are movements concerning the
effect that the landscape generates in itself and through the characters. These
moments are brought forward through images that appeal to the senses like the one
where we see the children facing a gigantic factory that stands like a fairytale dragon,
or through images that stand as allegorical signs such as when the travelling players
sell their costumes at the bay of Thessaloniki signifying the bankruptcy of the Left.
The final destination becomes a symbolic image and it only takes a simple cut for the
children to be transported to this new space, a space that is never marked on their
cognitive map but acquires a material substance in the form of a tree.

As I pointed out in the introduction, in his book Cinema 2 Deleuze notes that the
aftermath of the Second World War finds the modern subject wandering in spaces
where the sense of organic relationship that allowed the emergence of safety and
identity has been lost. 3 Deleuze cites Antonioni as the director who marks the
encounter of the modern individual with these new spaces of factories, cement
wastelands and functional buildings. It is in L’Eclisse where we see the famous
sequence where Monica Vitti looks out of a window in her partner’s flat just as they
are about to split up. Through the window pane she sees a gigantic building
resembling a looming atomic explosion. It is the encounter with the new that
provides the filmic space. In Red Desert these spaces become all-embracing. The
factories, the endless lines of gigantic electric poles, the polluted wastelands are seen
through the eyes of a neurotic individual whose gaze, according to Pasolini, informs
the style of the film, as we saw in our discussion of Voyage to Cythera.

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Landscape in the Mist presents an industrial landscape that carries the aura of
Antonioni’s spaces in Red Desert. Likewise we are presented with dislocated places
and spaces of transition: a highway where the two children will meet another type of
patriarchal violence in the shape of a truck driver; the multiple train stations and the
by now familiar run-down neoclassical buildings in the rural periphery. But as I have
already stated in The Beekeeper Angelopoulos retains a dialectic with the past that is
absent in Antonioni. The two children are searching for their maker so in a way their
journey is aimed towards an origin. The run-down neoclassical buildings come
straight from The Travelling Players where they hosted the battle of grand ideologies
through the Brechtian use of the song. Now they are loci of melancholia. This is
why the old violinist who is none other than Spyros from Voyage to Cythera appears
in the old café of an unnamed rural town. Inside the café Young Alexandros, who
had previously walked in asking for something to eat but did not have any money,
was clearing tables in exchange for his food. Spyros, who now appears as a street
musician, enters the café and starts to play his violin. The boy stops working and,
mesmerised by the sounds of the violin, climbs on a chair in order to sit and listen to
the old man. However the old café becomes a dislocated space. The free play of
imagination that created a meeting point for the two is rudely interrupted by the
owner of the café who drives the old man away. The sequence is not contrasted with
what is to come. Each sequence signifies the presence of an indifferent milieu so in a
way it is like a terminal.

What ties these spaces together in the filmic world is that they are stations on a
journey undertaken by the two young protagonists. The presence of these stations in
the narrative, however, is not directed by an active agent in a previous sequence as
we might see in Shakespearean drama, where the arrival of a messenger would
automatically challenge the evolution of events and lead the main characters in a
particular direction. A sequence where a dead white horse is dragged along by a
farming vehicle in the middle of a wide road on a wintry night is rich in symbolism,
yet it is as if the children only happen to be there by chance. In terms of plot
evolution, the sequence might seem redundant. It does not offer any change of
direction in the journey nor does it introduce a new character who will change the

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course of events. The sequence with the dead horse might have been absent and the
overall meaning of the film would not change. What would be altered however,
along with what the sequence means to convey as a subject for thought, is a map
drawn by the affective response of the viewer in relation to the projected images, in
the same way as the spaces encountered by the filmic characters affect them either as
fields of memories or dystopian planes.

The sequence with the horse starts with the children entering the frame from the left.
From a right diagonal perspective, the camera records a wide road. Far in the
background is a hotel building where a party is taking place. Suddenly the main door
opens and a bride comes out crying. She moves slightly towards the foreground and
towards the centre of the frame and then stops. The groom, an army officer, catches
up with her and, comforting her, takes her back to the building. After a pause the
sound of a motor is heard offscreen to the right. A tractor enters the frame dragging
behind it a white horse on a rope.

The sequence marks the children’s first encounter with death. It is also a symbolic
image that depicts the succession of one mode of production by another - an
agricultural economy gives way to the advent of modernity. On a third self-reflexive
manner the white horse is none other than Megalexandros’ white horse. What we see
in the sequence is an image of revolution being dragged to its ultimate defeat by the
reign of industrial capitalism. The bride is Spyros’ daughter and the officer the man
she marries at the beginning of The Beekeeper. Yet as we have seen in that film, the
officer stands for an allegorical image that implies the army’s constant intervention
in Greek politics. The choreographed sequence ends with the children in front of the
dead horse. In the background a group of passers-by is singing merrily. The sequence
functions in terms of an autonomous tableau that hosts two events whose meaning
goes beyond the world of fiction. From the perspective of the children as agents for
the unravelling of the plot, the sequence is part of a coming-of-age narrative that
marks their first confrontation with death. But the shot also becomes didactic,
reflecting the socio-historical milieu as well as its cultural counterpart through the
references to the director’s previous work, which is by now part of this heritage. 4

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The sequence reflects the temporal mode of the film, where the duration of the long
take incorporates the times of two or more separate actions or alternatively the time
before and after the unravelling of a single action. This is a familiar motif from
previous films. But with this film, Angelopoulos also introduces a number of
structural differences. The use of slow motion as well as the use of fade in/fade out,
together with an attempt at more visual proximity make their way into the director’s
filmography. When the children escape from the police station they lapse into slow
motion as they run from the back of the street almost straight into the camera. The
sequence ends with a fade to black. We also have slow motion in the first two shots
of the sequence that shows the gigantic hand rising from the bottom of the sea. In the
first we see the hand emerging from the sea. The second is a low angle shot of the
approaching helicopter that will carry it away in the third and most majestic image of
the sequence. Moreover the film includes the use of visual effects, for example in
the image of the snow that falls outside the police station during the children’s
escape. Artificial snow is also used during the sequence with the dead horse. Another
stylistic feature that has been present since Days of ’36 is the momentary freezing of
the actors. In that film, the indecisiveness of the representatives of bureaucratic
authority inside the warden’s office led them to freeze like grotesque statues.
Similarly in The Travelling Players during the Battle of Athens sequence, the actors
would take up a position of stillness thus reinforcing the distanciation effect of the
shot. After the grotesque performance that the troupe give for the British soldiers at
the beachfront, both the soldiers and the troupe freeze at the sound of a gunshot
coming from offscreen.

In Landscape in the Mist, when the children escape from captivity all the passers-by
are frozen like statues. The stillness here is of a dream-like nature, reinforcing the
irrationality of the escape. It is the fairytale formula that allows the director to freeze
the action, thus portraying visually the gap between the children’s power to dream
and an inhospitable reality. Later on in the narrative, during the second and most
majestic flight from reality, when the statue of the hand is about to emerge from the
depths of the sea and the helicopter is approaching, we see the children walking in

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slow pace as they come closer to the spectacular event. Behind them there are three
still men. They are on bicycles and wearing yellow rain coats. As soon as the statue
emerges and Karaindrou’s musical score has given full gravity to the sequence, the
three cyclists also take flight. The cyclists will become emblematic of the cinema of
Angelopoulos’ second period. Like the monumental hand that vanishes into thin air
above the sea, they too will become fleeting images of time passing.

In addition to these new visual features, the music of Karaindrou is given more space
in the narrative. The minimal soundtracks of the two previous films provided a
melancholic undertone as a general motif. Both in Voyage to Cythera and The
Beekeeper the music maintains a distance from the main characters and functions as
a key in to the soundtrack of the mise en scene. In Landscape in the Mist, the
musical score highlights more the psychological state of the characters and acquires a
stronger presence throughout the whole film.

When Voula and Alexandros are reunited with Orestes, all three of them flee towards
a sandy beach far from the industrial periphery of the city. Their escape is
accompanied by the film’s musical score leading them all the way to the top of a hill
where Orestes triumphantly shouts “We have escaped them!”. Similarly, every time
the children get on a train, the music signifies their momentarily release from anxiety
and their flight to freedom.

The use of fade in/fade out, the incorporation of a classical pattern of alternation
between establishing shots, medium and close up shots, the use of music to heighten
emotional response to the action and the presence of simple continuity shots that
follow the children’s movements in space become motifs that act as a companion to
the use of the long takes which observe from a distance. As Angelopoulos notes:
“What ties these formalistic changes together is a sense of timing that is absolutely
personal. The film contains a polymorphous structure yet it retains an absolute
homogeneity. No one would say that this is not an Angelopoulos film.” 5 What also
becomes apparent is a shift in the style of acting. We could argue that there is a shift

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towards a more melodramatic style where the characters engage in dramatic dialogue
and the image often releases an outburst of emotions through the actor.

At the end of the dead horse sequence we see a close up of Alexandros crying.
When Voula dances with Orestes on the beach she suddenly runs away in tears and
the camera follows her until she kneels down by the sea. The emphasis on emotion
centres mostly upon Orestes’ encounter with the children. However, quite often the
result does not meet the intention. The dialogues often sound overburdened with
sentiment, for example in the sequence where Orestes narrates the opening of a
theatrical performance to Alexandros, or when Voula overhears her uncle saying to a
policeman that their father does not exist. The director on the other hand manages to
draw satisfying performances from his two young actors while retaining an overall
distance from empathy throughout this conscious dive into melodrama. This can be
seen in the much-quoted rape scene where we see Voula falling prey to the truck
driver. The camera remains at a distance framing the truck after the girl has been
dragged inside and we as viewers are left helpless staring at the sealed back of the
vehicle. Angelopoulos’ sense of respect for pain and trauma will yet again
engage/distance the viewer through a gaze which moves on the periphery of the
action. In a familiar motif, the shot builds a dialectic between offscreen and onscreen
space. The offscreen space becomes part of the onscreen space, with the truck
remaining in constant view. It is the director’s aim to create a sense of terror and a
feeling of powerlessness on the part of the viewer. This terror could be reinforced by
an increase of tension as two cars stop in the far background. The driver of the first
car steps out and goes back to the car that has been following him. He seems to be
having a conversation with the other driver or the person sitting next to him. It is not
clear if this is Orestes searching for the children or if it is just a group of strangers.
One cannot help thinking that they might come closer, see the terrible act that is
taking place and rescue the girl. Angelopoulos however does not offer this
redemptive option. After what seems to be a brief exchange of words the man steps
back into his car and then both cars leave. Angelopoulos presents a ruthless and
menacing landscape where safety seems to have totally disappeared. Yet this image
will be reversed at the end of the film. It is in a space formed between a piece of

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celluloid and the projected desire of the children that the tree of hope will appear in
full substance.

The space between

Gilberto Perez in his writings on Friedrich Murnau, the prolific film director of the
silent era, calls the long shot the medium to describe the space between. Quoting
Jose Ortega y Gasset on the difference of proximate and distant vision, where the
first has a tactile quality and the latter the quality of a spectral, he asserts that:

In distant vision no object stands out and our gaze instead spreads over the
entire visual field, so that the central object of attention becomes the space
between objects, the hollow space that reaches to our eyes as objects recede
into the distance, the air in which all seem to float like a mirage. 6

Landscape in the Mist is the space between the travelling players in their encounter
with an ahistorical present. It is the space between the children and Germany, the
limbo that the director feels at the end of the battle of grand narratives. It is the return
of a distant gaze, that of the long take, which brings back the travelling players from
the deep, out of the mist.

After they have escaped from the police station and are continuing their journey on
foot, the two protagonists meet Orestes for the first time at the side of a rural road,
where the latter has stopped in order to repair his van. Orestes offers to take them
with him. As they drive to a nearby village he tells them his name and introduces
himself as an actor in a troupe that travels round Greece staging the rural play Golfo
the Shepherdess. When they arrive at the main square of the village all three step out
of the van and Orestes starts unloading his motorcycle from the back of the vehicle.
He remarks: “We must hurry. They are going to be here soon.” The camera that had
framed the van from the side now performs a tracking movement to the left and
reveals the open space of the square and a road in the far background. It is from that

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misty road in the far background that the troupe returns. They are reunited as if
nobody had died. As they emerge from the distance, the word “hope” is sculptured
into the image in the space between the camera lens (substituting our vision) and the
dark silhouettes slowly approaching the foreground.

The filmic world as Perez notes is never restricted to what lies in frame. It is always
in relation to what lies offscreen that the meaning of the frame is asserted. 7 Early
cinema with Griffith treats the image as a stage, where the space is confined within
the frame hosting the action and an alternating montage reveals a tension build up on
fragments of space which exclude what lies around them. With Murnau, cinema
acquires a different vision. Things appear at a distance and the offscreen space
becomes equally important as the onscreen space. An example of this can be found in
Nosferatu (1922), when the menacing shadow of the vampire enters the frame from
out of field in a shot that had previously only shown us an empty wall on a staircase.
This is a change of quality which is immanent to the duration of the shot. The same
shot acquires a new signification, that of death approaching. And it is always in
relation to this dark elusive silhouette that remains unframed after its arrival in town
that the onscreen space acquires meaning. The coffins that appear in the middle of
the streets for example are in a dialectical relationship to the menacing vampire,
despite the fact that his onscreen presence after his arrival is minimal. Furthermore,
in Murnau the mise en scene becomes the prime signification of a rising tension and
as Perez notes in relation to Sunrise, during the sequence where we see the wife and
her husband on the boat it is the image of the engulfing sea that informs the viewer
and the wife of the husband’s malicious intentions. 8

Similarly in Landscape in the Mist, although the film adopts a more proximate vision
than the Trilogy of History, it is the space between the recorded objects that comes to
the foreground. Space comes to signify a transition, a passage. We find this principle
in Mizogushi and Antonioni; from the early seventies we find it in Angelopoulos as
well. In the first sequence by the beach outside Thessaloniki we see the members of
the troupe rehearsing. It is not as actors of the rural play Golfo the Shepherdess that
they read out their lines, but as the actors of the film The Travelling Players. The

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camera tracks among the bodies waiting on the beach outside the city. While the
camera turns a wide circle round each member of the troupe, the surrounding open
space of the brown sandy beach with the cement houses in the far background
marking the city limits informs the viewer of the players’ isolation. As they stand
immobile or going round in circles, the track ends with an image of the Poet who
stands aside of the troupe, delivering the same ferocious poem as he did at the end of
The Travelling Players. The poem is an accusation against the exploitation of the
concept of revolution, an exploitation that leads to the reestablishment of an
authoritarian status quo dressed under different clothing. Yet the poem sustains the
promise for a radical break with the current social conditions. However it is as if the
answer to his plea comes from the theatre owner who enters the frame inside a car in
the far background. The car moves parallel to where the troupe stands in the
foreground. As he comes out of the car, the theatre owner moves only halfway into
the foreground in order to announce the end of their partnership. Because he must
meet the demands of the market he can no longer offer his theatre to the players. This
agent is none other than Spyros’ friend from The Beekeeper where we saw him as a
manager of a multi-national company. His presence signifies yet again the third road
taken by the popular Left in Greece, that of embracing capitalism. The sequence shot
passes from one action to the next as it ends with Clytemnestra leaving with Orestes
in search of another venue – a search which will be futile. All that remains is for the
troupe to be transported to the bay of Thessaloniki in order to sell their stage
costumes; as they stand in line the image of the sea behind them inscribes a natural
border between them and the reclaiming of the present.

It is as if the camera of Angelopoulos becomes an index pointing in different

directions in time at a unified space. Angelopoulos inscribes a space as a threshold,
where actions acquire their identity always in relation to this in between. Time
becomes a spatial dimension where the past lies behind the mist; it takes a simple pan
to the left for it to appear in focus. It is as if the present film signifies the
impossibility of such a track outside art, as if the direction towards the past has been
lost and that is why the Travelling Players, although visually present, are obsolete
and redundant.

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Yet the film is not a testimony of despair. In the port at Thessaloniki, Orestes and the
children witness what we could call the final wonder of God or the receding image of
the leading hand. The gigantic hand emerges from the water but unlike
Michelangelo’s hand of God in the Sistine Chapel’s Creation (to which the sculpture
is an obvious allusion), the pointing finger is missing. The characters are left staring
at the mass of stone as it is carried away by the helicopter. Behind them the cement
buildings of the port of Thessaloniki form a grey line dividing the sea and the sunset
in the sky.

It is as if Angelopoulos were implying that now that the images of great leaders and
grand ideologies have receded, the artist retains the right to lament but not be in
despair for an irreparable loss. The movement for the acquisition of power as
sketched in Megalexandros fostered the dead end of a repetitive circle; Angelopoulos
portrayed the darkness and the pain generated by the struggles against exclusion,
towards an ideal of equality. As Terry Eagleton points out and as we see in the above
mentioned film, revolutions at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the
20th signified a struggle to end alienation but then produced their own kinds of
alienation. 9 The shot becomes monumental in the grandeur of its composition yet it
is also one of critical perspective. The hand is no longer pointing at anything.

The monumental statue is carried away by a helicopter; this is not a metaphysical

flight. As Vassiliki Kolokotroni points out, Angelopoulos states that if this was an
image from a Tarkovsky film, the finger would still be pointing. Angelopoulos
composes a monumental image. 10 Yet the hand is not standing at a fixed point in
space to which the camera can always return. It is a fleeting image where we see the
receding hand as it literally vanishes into thin air. What remains is the space between
the children’s gaze and the receding hand, floating in the sky like a mirage. The gaze
of the children is used as a symbol of a new beginning. Their innocence stands as a
kind of forgetfulness, which should not be confused with amnesia. It is a
forgetfulness that allows movement in a new direction yet retains the images and
forms of the past. Angelopoulos here is not interested in exploring a new formalism.

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The form of the film is not a breakaway from the past; it is a return, suspended
between a critical and monumental view of history. The constructed cinematic space
is one of familiarity yet it is as if the director were welcoming the breaking out of a
different image for the future. The final shot finds the children embracing a tree. This
is not a new image, yet it is hopeful in its content.

In the penultimate sequence of the film we see the children attempt to cross the
border at night by crossing a river on a boat. The light beam from a border
watchtower falls on the boat. Offscreen, we hear a guard shout. At the sound of a
weapon firing, the image fades into black. The film cuts to an image of a landscape
in the mist. The two children are framed from a high angle as they enter the frame,
startled by an image of a tree that appears out of the mist. It is the tree that Orestes
imagines lying behind the mist in the blank celluloid they find in the street at an
earlier point in the narrative. “In the beginning there was chaos,” says Alexandros,
reaching for his sister’s hand. “And then there was light, and the light was divided
from darkness.” We could say, following Perez, who saw the light that dispels the
shadow of the vampire in Nosferatu as that of the medium of cinema, 11 that it is the
same light that casts away the shadow of fear in Landscape in the Mist and shapes
the surrounding chaos in the form of a tree for the children to embrace. In the space
formed between the viewer and the projected image, utopia still lingers.

1
Personal interview with the author, June 2005, upublished.
2
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2 –The Time Image, Athlone Press, London, 1989, p.3.
3
Gilles Deleuze, ibid, pp.8-9.
4
Eirini Stathi makes a similar statement. The self-reflexive manner of his late films becomes a
reference to a corpus that has been inscribed as part of a cultural heritage. It is now a cultural index.
See Ειρήνη Στάθη, ‘Με το χρωστήρα του Θόδωρου Αγγελόπουλου’, in Θόδωρος Αγγελόπουλος,, ed.
Ειρήνη Στάθη, Φεστιβάλ Κινηματογράφου Θεσσαλονίκης - Εκδόσεις Καστανιώτη, Αθήνα, 2000,
p.172.
5
Theo Angelopoulos interview for the periodical Λέξις included in Γιάννης Σολδάτος, Ιστορία του
Ελληνικού Κινηματογράφου Β΄ Τόμος, Αιγόκερως, Αθήνα, 1999, pp 386-387.

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6
Gilberto Perez, The Material Ghost-Films and their Medium, The John Hopkins University Press,
Baltimore London, 1998, p. 135.
7
Gilberto Perez, ibid, p. 137.
8
Gilberto Perez, ibid, p. 143.
9
Terry Eagleton, Sweet Violence –the Idea of the Tragic, Blackwell Publishing, Malden-Oxford,
2003, p.59.
10
Vassiliki Kolokotroni, ‘Monuments of Time’ in Post-War Cinema and Modernity: a film reader, ed.
John Orr & Olga Taxidou, 2000, p. 406.
11
See Gilberto Perez, The Material Ghost-Films and their Medium, ibid. p. 148.

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 THE SUSPENDED STEP OF THE STORK / TO ΜΕΤΕΩΡΟ ΒΗΜΑ ΤΟΥ
ΠΕΛΑΡΓΟΥ

Alexandros is a TV journalist making a documentary on groups of immigrants whom

the State authorities have placed in a small town district on the northern borders of
Greece. During the making of the documentary his attention is drawn to an old
immigrant who is recorded sitting inside a wagon of an abandoned train that the
immigrants use for shelter. The documentary takes on a different twist as the
journalist becomes obsessed with the image of the old man and tries to discover the
truth concerning his identity. The old immigrant looks identical with a politician who
disappeared ten years ago.

With the Suspended Step of the Stork in 1992 Angelopoulos launched his “borders”
trilogy. Once again the Greek director situated the action of his film in the northern
town of Florina in winter and cast Marcello Mastroianni with whom he had gained a
wider international recognition with The Beekeeper. In this film, the Italian star plays
a ragged immigrant who looks identical to a famous politician who has been missing
for ten years and Jeanne Moreau plays the politician’s wife whom Alexandros brings
to Florina in order to identify whether the solitary immigrant really is her husband.

Angelopoulos reunited Mastroianni and Moreau, the couple from Antonioni’s La

Notte in which the two stars acted together in 1962. However, such a reunion meant
nothing to the local church bishop in Florina, Kandiotis, who after having read parts
of the script decided that the film was blasphemous and anti-nationalist. He tried to
prevent the film shoot by any means available, from giving speeches against
Angelopoulos calling him an atheist, to organising lynch mobs that would tear down
the film sets. After the shoot, Mikes Karapiperis, who had been Angelopoulos’ set
designer since Reconstruction, died from heart failure. According to Konstantinos
Themelis, he had been under too much pressure from the ongoing war with Bishop
Kandiotis. Themelis notes that the French producer was ready to stop the shoot after

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he personally visited Florina and saw what the crew was up against. He also notes
that the State authorities did not prosecute Kandiotis but rather kept a dubious
position of neutrality throughout the whole period of the shoot. 1

The film was included in the official Cannes Festival but did not win the Palme d’Or
as the Greek director was hoping. The film was poorly received in cinemas, both in
Greece and abroad. However, in the following pages, I will argue that it is a work of
extreme significance and one of the three most important films in the director’s
second period, the other two being Voyage to Cythera and Ulysses’ Gaze.

The Suspended Step of the Stork revolves around the story of a documentary
filmmaker Alexandros, who while making a film about the immigrants living at the
northern borders of Greece, meets an immigrant recluse who looks identical to a
famous politician that has been missing for ten years. Alexandros then embarks on a
quest to prove that the immigrant and the missing politician are the same person.
This quest will reflect a wider problematic concerning the issue of identity both on a
personal and a social sphere. It will also reflect the desire for a new form of
collective action.

In this chapter I will demonstrate how the director returns to a more hopeful
portrayal of communal activity in relation to the Trilogy of Silence. I will also claim
that through the story of the immigrant recluse, the film denies a social reality which
is fixed on the precept of this is how things are and moves into what I will call the
realm of the not yet. 2 The realm of the not yet is a realm that anticipates social
conditions where the subject is not defined by static national identities or any given
social identities but becomes part of a social flow of a collective doing. Instead of
having an individualistic identity the self is in a process of self-determination
through a continuous denial of static identities that reinforce the status quo. The term
‘doing’ is here once again, as in Megalexandros, borrowed from social theorist John
Holloway. It becomes a concept that denies a world seen as consisting of separate
individual objective entities. It launches a process where everything one does is part
of a social process. It reintroduces the notion of a subject as part of a chorus, a chorus

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that is anarchic and discordant where every action, even contemplation, is seen from
the perspective of a social flow. 3 I will also claim that the film looks at the increasing
number of national borders in the Balkans at the end of the twentieth century and
focuses on the issue of immigration as a phenomenon that challenges the idea of the
homogenous identity of a national citizen body. Through this challenge the film
keeps the hope for a radical change to the existing social conditions alive.

In terms of cinematography this breakdown of individual identities presents, as in the

previous films, a world seen through a semi-autonomous vision that blends the gaze
of the main character and that of the camera. This vision becomes a direct image of
time as change, a change that is immanent to the duration of the shot. It is a change
like that of a verb that changes the static identity of a noun which is then set in
motion, in a continuous process of becoming.

The film starts with images of dead immigrants floating in the open sea while an
army helicopter approaches to collect the bodies. The narrative then follows
Alexandros as he makes a TV documentary on the immigrant district in a small
border town. What we see are images of immigrants crammed inside the wagons of a
deserted train. The immigrants use the wagons of this old train for shelter. The very
act of the first video recording becomes a visual metaphor.

In an objective shot we witness Alexandros and the crew as they are about to record
the wagons with their video camera. While the crew is looking offscreen to the left
towards the train, we see the cameraman as he raises his video camera and starts
recording. The narrative cuts to a tracking shot taken from the place where they are
standing. The camera moves parallel to the wagons as they stand in line, immobile.
The tracking shot however is not taken with the video camera, and instead follows
the objective shot of the crew as they are about to start recording. It appears as if it
adopts their point of view. The very fact that it is a mobile shot suggests its
subjective point of view. One would expect then that this tracking shot would be
presented through the lens of the video camera. In terms of classical narrative it
would be the point of view of the crew as they move parallel to the train wagons. Yet

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the narrative does not identify with their point of view. The tracking shot belongs to
the camera eye that creates the filmic world. This eye blends their point of view with
the autonomous subjectivity of the camera and the result is a semi-subjective point of
view that frames the wagons in a poetic manner, as the immigrants stand still at the
entrance of each wagon, staring straight into the camera lens. It is a point of view
where the boundary between documentary and fiction collapses. The immigrants’
gaze testifies to this indistinguishable blend between documentary and fiction. It
would be natural if the immigrants were staring straight at the video camera for the
documentary. But the camera is not that of the documentary crew. It is that of the
world of fiction.

Soon after this shoot which is part of his documentary, Alexandros is back in Athens.
We find him alone inside the studio of a TV station, while an image is projected on a
big video screen. The image shows a train wagon in the middle of an open field. As
the camera slowly zooms in, we see a man sitting at the entrance to the wagon,
smoking. Is this person the politician who disappeared ten years ago? We as viewers
are presented with an image that includes the video image projected on the wall and
Alexandros inside the projection room. This double framing, the TV image included
in the filmic image, in fact includes a third one: that of Mastroianni being framed by
the sliding doors of the wagon. It is as if we are presented with an inner montage of
shots that recede ad infinitum. The medium close-up of the TV image is included in
the long take of the cinematic image. Mastroianni is also framed by the doors of the
wagon. He resembles a portrait, as do all the immigrants in the above described
sequence where we see them standing still, framed inside moving boxes that do not
move. Mastroianni does not belong to the world that surrounds the wagons, a world
that is framed by soldiers and barbed wires.

Apart from being a mere referent to two worlds marked by social and economical
inequality, hence the double framing that separates one world from the other,
Angelopoulos here questions the ontology of the filmic medium and its ability to
render an objective unquestionable truth. The double framing reinforces the dream-
like presence of Mastroianni. He appears for the first time as an image inside the

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image. The video image in its composition contains a dream-like quality. The wagon
lies in the middle of an open field. While in the sequence described above we witness
a train left abandoned at the railway station, this wagon lies isolated in the middle of
nowhere. The sequence establishes a strong sense of ambiguity in relation to the
immigrant’s identity.

In his attempt to reach a final truth Alexandros arranges a meeting between the
characters played by Mastroianni and Moreau. Alexandros and his crew record the
meeting with their video camera. The story however is not there: the wife does not
recognise her husband. The gaze of the journalist turns into that of a voyeur as the
video frame zooms in for the close up that would potentially extract the moment of
extreme sentiment. The moment of recognition remains suspended, leaving the
drama on the side.

In classic dramaturgy from Sophocles to Shakespeare all the way to the classic
Hollywood period as established in the thirties, the moment of recognition is usually
a key moment for the resolution of the drama, and the moment from which the
Aristotelian catharsis will follow. In The Suspended Step of the Stork however, the
moment of recognition is staged. Instead of filming an event, the journalist directs an
act that fails to deliver the expected result. Up to the moment of the meeting which
takes place on a bridge, the film follows the investigation of Alexandros and his
crew. The end of the investigation comes half an hour before the film ends, leaving
Alexandros at odds with his purpose. The narrative refuses to unfold a continuity
system that will reach a climax. Angelopoulos’ cinema abandons the safety of a
closed system of a beginning-middle-end pattern.

At an earlier point in the narrative we see Alexandros as he visits Moreau in Athens.

While walking around the city she recounts the story of her husband’s disappearance.
At one point and with no previous warning a light beam is thrown onto her face by a
TV crew which starts filming her. She immediately reacts in terror and screams
“Stop! You do not have the right.” Alexandros also tells them to stop. What we see
in this sequence is an event that turns from the recounting of a story to the

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merchandising of human pain. But what exactly is this light if not a metaphor for the
will to power over the individual? Towards the end of the film Alexandros admits:
“All I wanted to do is film people without having any interest for their feelings.”

We could see this act of throwing light as a metaphor for man’s need to see more, to
know more. In “Vision Machine”, Paul Virilio argues that the technological advent
of modernity goes hand in hand with a desire for pure illumination. Phenomena
appear as knowable objects for study; they are given names and then are placed
under categories with clearly defined characteristics. The city of light, Paris, is
illuminated not only as a means of surveillance but as a phenomenal shield against
death where death equals the realm of undefined phenomena. Paris becomes a total
image where everything falls under the reign of the eye. Virilio argues that man’s
exaggerated love for light is what brings about the darkness. The enlightened man
becomes an investigator where his scientific methods will bring about the final
answer and everything will be explained; shedding light to cast away the fear of
darkness.

When you know everything you are afraid of nothing, the French
Revolution had turned the elucidation of details into a means of
governing. Omnivoyance, Western Europe’s totalitarian ambition,
may here appear as the formation of a whole image by repressing
the invisible. And since all that appears, appears in light – the
visible being merely the reality-effect of the response of a light
emission – we could say that the formation of a total image is the
result of illumination. Through the speed of its own laws, this
illumination will progressively quash the laws originally dispensed
by the universe: laws not only governing things but bodies as well. 4

By trying to shed light onto the immigrant’s past and through the attempt to identify
him as the missing politician, Alexandros is staging a recognition event. He arranges
for Moreau to meet him on a bridge above the river that passes through the border

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town. But when the two meet Moreau turns her head towards the film crew that has
been filming the event from afar and bluntly exclaims: “C’est ne pas lui.”

Should we not claim that Alexandros is attempting to create a total image, as if to

rationalise the nomadic movement of a man without identity? An immigrant is
placed at the centre of attention. He turns into a protagonist for a story which the
journalist believes will bring forth a new spark of light in a period of permeating
melancholia. But the Mastroianni character refuses to be placed onto the iconic
pedestal of the leader. The road taken by Megalexandros belongs to the past.
Mastroianni chooses invisibility; he becomes a nomad who appears in random places
as if he were moving away from reality towards the realm of mythology. He speaks
through fairytales that speak of a grand immigration that will take place in an
unidentified future, when the human race will be forced to abandon their place on
earth. The nomad refuses to be placed back into the light. Shedding light on the
domain of the private sphere also coincides with the presence of the army that
regulates the immigrants’ movements in and around the small town. The army
becomes a signifier of a force that excludes and territorialises.

The silence of the chorus

In contrast to Alexandros’ obsession with the identity of one man as a new image of
hope, Angelopoulos turns the narrative away from the trailing of a single individual.
The trek of the leader was mapped in Megalexandros where we saw the charismatic
persona of a revolutionary turning into a despot. Now the journey across a
geographical plain on the way to the commune is substituted by the static image of
an interzone. The small border town is a space between. It stands as a transitory
space in a journey of necessity taken by economic immigrants. Angelopoulos moves
to the borderlines and the camera frames the snowy town as a transitional space of
waiting, where the movement of the immigrants is being halted and placed under
surveillance. It is in that space that their agency comes to the foreground.

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In a manner reminiscent of Reconstruction where the director included interviews
with real villagers, The Suspended Step presents a break from the fictional world by
introducing an audio montage of real immigrants speaking in their native languages
halfway through the film. While we see clothes collected from charity for the
immigrants being unloaded from a lorry in the middle of the central square, the
documented voices create a multi-cultural fresco built on layers of different
languages. The testimonies reveal the toil of the new other for it is the waves of
immigrants that now occupy a point of exclusion similar to that of the Left in Greece
throughout the twentieth century, as we have already seen in the work of
Angelopoulos. Yet they also express a hope for a better life. The director in turn sees
the oppression experienced by the uprooted as both cruel and unjust but at the same
time sustaining the seed for a path towards human equality. It is the state of
exclusion and oppression that inevitably brings the people together to act as a group.
It is as if Angelopoulos is planting the seeds of a new collective that remains
unidentified and it is this point of virtual promise that marks the filmic space.

The question as to whether the immigrants’ movement will be able to give rise to a
new collective dream remains unanswered, yet it is its virtual promise that becomes
important in the film. Angelopoulos observes using the familiar motif of the
eyewitness. During the sequence described above the authorial narrative gives way to
an audio montage of an almost Brechtian manner where the director includes
interviews with real people. The boundary between documentary and fiction collapse
into one vision that is at one didactic, since it is informative, but also affective, since
we are asked to feel their pain. By letting the image simply include the voices
without any narrative drive it is as if the director is commenting on the rise of a new
collective free of a superimposing agency.

Let us now see how this new group of voyagers is staged in relation to the framing of
group action in the previous films of Angelopoulos. We have already seen how the
choreographed movement of groups and their use of song as a weapon in a process of
social struggle became emblematic of Angelopoulos’ Seventies films. In the first
period that dates up to Megalexandros, Angelopoulos constantly employed the use of

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song as a means to express dramatically the collective experience of particular social
groups. The songs did not support the psychology of the individual but rather
identified his/her social function while simultaneously connecting the world of
fiction to its historical and cultural context. It is almost impossible not to view the
presence of these groups in terms of a chorus. In the Trilogy of Silence however, the
use of live singing becomes reflective either of a haunting presence or a melancholic
nostalgia. The central motif of the first two films in the trilogy was a permeating
melancholia generated through an encounter of an alienated individual with a social
milieu unreflective of his desire. In Landscape in the Mist the alienated hero is
replaced by the gaze of two children but again the cinematic landscape is one of
dislocation and shattered dreams. Throughout the three films we experience the
absence or the metaphorical silence of larger group dynamics. From Voyage to
Cythera onwards the chorus either turns silent or passive.

In Voyage to Cythera we see port workers celebrating a day dedicated to the

workers’ movement inside a café in the port. During the celebration the authorities
bring Spyros to the port in an attempt to get the old protagonist to leave Greek
territory. Spyros had returned to Greece after thirty-three years since he had gone
into self-imposed exile in order to escape execution or life imprisonment after the
end of the civil war. On his return Spyros refuses to agree to the public sale of his
property thus sabotaging the plans forged between the villagers and a multi-national
company that wants to exploit the land to build of a ski resort. The local villagers
react and want him out of the way. Spyros flees the village after the rest of the
villagers try to lynch him but he is then arrested by the police. When the authorities
bring him to the port but fail to make him embark on a Russian ship they place him
on a raft on the open seas with the excuse that his permit has not been validated yet.

Throughout the whole process we witness the workers inside the café unable to
intervene. Before the old man is brought to the port we see them dancing to the same
boogie rhythm that was used in The Travelling Players for the 1946 New Year’s Eve
sequence. In that sequence, the Leftist youth use the song but change its lyrics to
words of ridicule directed at the occupying English forces and the fascists. The use of

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the same melody without any lyrics in Voyage to Cythera turns the song into a
statement aimed at the degradation of the working class movement along with their
inability to voice a protest or create a new language. The movement of the actors
inside the café does not reflect a dynamic entity; it is rather reduced to a mere
presence that occupies the café interior. The workers finally decide to give a
symbolic performance at night outside the café dedicated to the man on the raft. The
elliptical arrangement of the mise en scène where we see the musicians on stage but
without the presence of an audience reflects yet again an absent drive.

This shot supplements another sequence earlier in the narrative where the empty
square outside the café echoes to a series of revolutionary songs coming from
loudspeakers. Inbetween the songs a voice dedicates the day to the workers’
movement. During the sequence we see Alexandros as he attempts to trace the
person sitting behind the microphone transmitting the show. He ends up on the upper
floor of an empty building where he finds out that the whole programme has been
pre-recorded and is being transmitted while no-one is there.

In Voyage to Cythera then we witness the fetishisation of a cultural process through

recorded song, which comes in direct contrast to the live chorus-like singing of
groups of people during the Trilogy of History. This is not the mechanical
reproduction of the work of art that Walter Benjamin envisioned. 5 The recorded
songs do not support the education of a collective nor do they aspire to make the
means of production accessible to a wider audience. Added to the fact that there is no
longer a workers’ movement or a collective drive, the presence of the recorded song
denotes a social reality where revolutionary songs have copyrights that belong either
to music companies or individual artists. Having lost touch with reality they are now
only means for the personal benefit of an individual singer on his way to becoming a
national star.

Similarly in The Beekeeper the search for identity through negation and the sexual
drive of the young drifter are exploited by a culture industry that articulates a
homogenised reaction through ephemeral pop songs. The Trilogy of Silence is

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marked by the absence of communal live singing. All the songs are recorded. It is
obvious that the director sees recorded songs as unable to express the voice of a
communal feeling, instead turning them into symbols of the main characters’ retreat
into solitude.

On a purely visual level, the presence of a silent chorus can acquire menacing
connotations like in Voyage to Cythera where a passive chorus of villagers gradually
turns into a lynch mob targeting the old partisan. In The Beekeeper another passive
chorus, this time consisting of soldiers, surrounds the protagonist while he makes his
way through the central square of a rural city in the North. Spyros might be
apathetically indifferent to their presence but the camera ruthlessly records the
dialectic between the alienated hero and the uniformed men. In Landscape in the
Mist there is a more hopeful image of public communion. Angelopoulos tries to
frame Greek Underground culture at the end of the Eighties yet its presence in the
narrative is quite limited and over-schematic.

Nevertheless in The Suspended Step of the Stork, Angelopoulos returns to familiar

territories. The director shifts his attention from the portrayal of contemporary urban
groups whose discourse is quite different from that of his own generation and places
the action again in a rural landscape. The openness of Lake Kerkini and the
architecture of Florina support his redemptive imagery, where the movement of the
human subjects is engulfed within a larger space devoid of urban noise and
distraction. This landscape renders an image of time that goes beyond the limited
timeframe of human action. As the characters move in and out of frame the camera
continues to record nature moving to its own rhythms, as if delivering a sense of
permanence.

This is not to say that violence, rupture and distraction are not inherent in the cinema
of Angelopoulos. Rupture has been present since the very opening of Reconstruction
when the frame freezes at the image of the family’s reunion. More than being a
reflexive device introducing the materiality of the medium and breaking an illusionist
aesthetic of objective realism, the freeze renders an ambiguous moment that could

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either signify rupture or endurance. One could argue that the sequence sustains in
memory a blissful moment of family reunion 6 and that the overlapping soundtrack is
part of an ethnographic gaze that aims at authenticity. Yet on further viewing and as
the narrative progresses the meaning of the shot changes into an eerie signification of
death. The song we are listening to is actually a lament and in the next sequence the
wife has already murdered her husband.

Angelopoulos returns to a rural landscape and violence is present from the very first
shot where we see a circle of dead bodies floating in the water. The film starts with
Alexandros reporting on the drowning of a group of immigrants in their attempt to
cross the borders by sea. In a familiar motif since Megalexandros the mise en scène
is marked by the presence of the circle. The helicopter that descends close to the
waters in order to collect the dead bodies of the immigrants creates expanding circles
at the surface of the sea and as the camera persists in the recording of the
phenomenon in actual time, it is as if the expanding circles acquire metaphysical
connotations of perpetual motion. The presence of the circle like in the previous
films denotes the notion of recurrence.

Angelopoulos marks another point in time, the threshold to the twenty first century,
to stage a visual poem about the need to find a new collective dream. As I have
already stated, Angelopoulos sees the immigrants as occupying the space of the other
in a manner similar to that of the Left during the postwar period in Greece. The new
society that the rebels envisioned in The Travelling Players and Megalexandros did
not come about. Angelopoulos observes the route of the uprooted and the link with
the past comes through the search for the politician who once shared the same
political agenda with the generation of The Travelling Players.

In the previous two films of Angelopoulos we saw the main characters embarking on
journeys that became metaphors for the search of identity within the periphery of
Greece. Now, in The Suspended Step, the journey has been put on hold. The narrative
remains constantly in the present while the long takes, accompanied by a music score
that reflects a state of limbo, together with the presence of the snow, transform the

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town into a space that moves beyond its historical present, into an eternal no man’s
land that challenges the idea of progress. Now the main character wanders among the
watchtowers and the night patrols as he reaches the country’s border, in turn
reflecting the vertical borders of an existentialist journey as it happens involuntarily.
The space of the film designates a face of modernity where the state is unable to
love, as Godard would have it. 7 The army surrounds the village of the immigrants.
They are placed under surveillance in the way that the father was put onto the raft in
Voyage to Cythera.

Yet again the presence of the army is recurrent as in every film of Angelopoulos.
What emerges is the notion of the absurd although its nature is quite different in this
film than that of his 1970s films like the Days of ’36 where the individual was
absolutely identified with a purely symbolic function - that of a state representative.
The result of this absolute identification was the reduction of the personality to a
public persona that mirrored the abstract power over of the state, hence the unnatural
and grotesque movement of the actors in the mise en scène. There is something
totally mechanical about their movement and reflecting the fact that the symbolic
function of power had taken over their bodies reducing them to a puppet-like
movement ruled by the fetish of the Law. When we see them what we actually see is
what they stand for, the power that embodies them. This time however the absurd
returns deprived of its social implications; it is rather that of an existential angst.

At one point in the narrative the army officer played by Ilias Logothetis is inspecting
a rank of soldiers in an open field. We as spectators see them in frontal perspective as
they stand in line. On a few occasions and for no apparent reason a soldier utters a
sentence with a strong poetical resonance forcing the officer to stand still. Each
phrase that reflects a deep-rooted anxiety freezes the officer who after a moment’s
pause continues his inspection as if nothing has happened. What we see is the
breakdown of the apparent naturalism of the shot into an absurd choreography of a
game of frozen statues. The shot creates a strong, uncanny effect, one that is reflected
in the officer’s remarks during the next sequence when he exclaims: “This is a

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terminal space at the very edge of the country. Everything here moves into a different
dimension. Loneliness, uncertainty…a feeling of constant threat…people go mad.”

The officer’s function here is far from that of the officer in The Beekeeper where he
appeared as a sign in an allegorical visual composition denoting the larger narrative
of the role of the army in recent Greek history. In the Suspended Step of the Stork the
officer (who remains nameless like everyone else in the film apart from Alexandros)
is a character portrayed at a psychological level. In another visually striking sequence
we see him as he approaches the borderline upon the bridge that connects/separates
the two countries and then stands still at the very edge of the line. He then lifts one
foot into the air as if he is ready to take another step, and it is as if his body is
imitating a stork who endlessly suspends one foot in the air while standing still. As
we see him there suspended with his back to the camera in a slight diagonal
perspective, a soldier from the other side of the border approaches slowly from the
background while loading his gun. Logothetis exclaims: “If I take one step further I
am somewhere else…or I’m dead.” With his words the sequence ends with a cut. In a
manner similar to the portrayal of the missing politician, the army officer is more of
a seer who observes life from a point of view that blends stoicism with absurdity
drawn straight from a play by Beckett.

Angelopoulos moves between the micronarratives of individuals and macronarratives

of larger social groups. On a macronarrative level we see a landscape where the
immigrants’ movements are being controlled by the presence of the army. On the
level of microhistories however, we see the individual in the midst of an existential
angst as he/she realises the limitations of his/her power to act. This shift from macro
to micro narratives is also portrayed through the stories of the immigrants who as I
have already stated, are presented in terms of a chorus. It is a chorus that shifts from
mourning a dead body after an immigrant has been assassinated in an act of vendetta,
to the silence of a wedding ritual that takes place on the two banks of the river which
forms a national border between two countries. It is here that we see the group of the
bride on one side of the river and that of the groom on the other.

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John Gould argues that in ancient Greek tragedy “the essence of the chorus, the
essential and distinctive feature of Attic drama, is considered in its role as
representatives of the collective citizen-body.” 8 Unlike comedy, the chorus in
tragedy does not contain elements of authorial intervention. The chorus does not
initiate or control the action. It is a “univocal expression of a group consciousness
and memory”. According to Gould the chorus is not necessarily that of the sovereign
community and he brings as an example The Phoenician Women where the chorus
consists of Trojan slaves. As he notes the chorus denotes…

…the experience of the excluded, the oppressed, and the vulnerable.

That ‘otherness’ of experience is indeed tied to its being; the
experience of a community but that community is not that of the
sovereign (adult, male) citizen-body. 9

The same could be argued for the tragedies of Aeschylus where the divine principle
is in the foreground. In Prometheus Bound the Oceanides reflect the point of view of
the oppressed who suffers at the sides of Prometheus. So it is the case in The
Suspended Step, where the chorus is formed by the immigrants who occupy the small
town surrounded by another authority, that of the army. This is the most striking
visual juxtaposition that marks the filmic space. The sovereign citizen body is absent,
or it could be argued is restricted to the past of the video image that Alexandros the
journalist excavates from the archives. Even then what we actually see is not the
presence of this social body as we did in The Travelling Players but rather the
representatives of that body in the parliament and the silence of a politician, as if to
admit the bankruptcy of urban democracy. During the episode in Athens we see
Alexandros as he searches through the visual archives of the national TV network in
order to obtain more information on the missing politician. Inside a studio he projects
the video of the politician’s last speech in parliament and it is there that the
politician, played by Marcello Mastroianni, ascends the podium only to deliver the
line: “The time has come to embrace the silence” and then walks away never to be
seen in public again.

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In the small town on the border, the sovereign Greek citizen body is absent, having
moved into the cities. But unlike young Alexandros who rides a donkey at the end of
Megalexandros carrying the memory of a historical struggle for autonomy and self-
determination, the sovereign citizen body resembles that of the petit bourgeoisie in
Voyage to Cythera that return to the village only to pass the land that was once
sustained by a local community over to a multinational company. What we see now
in the small town is nothing but a ‘representative’ of the sovereign citizen body: the
army guarding the borders of the state.

In The Suspended Step of the Stork, the borders of the state become an abstract
construction designed at the centre of the sovereign national state, away from the
periphery. In the film we do not witness this centre. From the very first shot of the
film we have already moved to the periphery, over to the borders. The film evokes a
feeling of ‘being there’, a feeling that brings to the foreground the absurdity of
national borders, an absurdity which is felt only if one visits the frontier line as is
demonstrated in the wedding sequence which is one of the two most visually striking
sequences of the film; the other being the final episode with the telecommunication
poles.

Separated by a river that functions as a national border, the immigrants meet secretly
on its two sides, with the bride’s family on the Greek side. Angelopoulos portrays the
absurdity of national borders that turn a local community into an excluded immigrant
body. The bride’s group belong to the same community that has stayed behind on the
other side of the border. What we see in the sequence is the result of abstracting
power from people who live in small communities and handing it over to a central
state power that divides and excludes. Angelopoulos sees the micronarratives of
groups that suffer and experience the pain of decisions taken on a macronarrative
level. The rise of the nation state from the middle of the 19th century all the way into
the 21st century has resulted in grand shifts of populations that lived in areas close to
what became borderlines. Yet as a phenomenon the shifting of large populations has
existed since Byzantine and Roman rule where a central power would mix

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populations either for the reinforcement of the Empire’s borders or to break up the
cohesion of an ethnic group that threatened to revolt.

In a familiar Angelopoulian manner the sequence is staged in long takes. The long
takes frame the people in group formation that meet in order to perform the ritual.
The river, a grand metaphor of flux within the passage of time, stands between the
divided choruses which perform the ritual of the wedding in silence. The perfectly
orchestrated movement amidst the clear-cut soundtrack of the surrounding nature
allow the sound of silence to come to the foreground. The sound of the stream blends
with the subtle noise of footsteps and that of the rice which the guests throw at the
newly-weds as an act of well-wishing. The use of telephoto lens and the open visual
field render an image where depth is somehow annulled and the figures seem to be
standing side by side. The human figures are included in a landscape that seems all
inclusive: the background trees, the river and the people seem to be on the same
plane as if in an icon. Here Angelopoulos alludes once more to Byzantine
iconography where depth is rendered merely by the change of size of the two
dimensional figures depicted rather than the use of central perspective.
Angelopoulos’ use of frontal framing that alternates into a slight diagonal brings
forth an action that takes place on parallel planes. In this case it is the line of the sky
with the lines of the river banks that are framed in a parallel formation. The image
acquires a tactile quality which is absent in the use of central perspective where
things seem to be receding into the frame and into infinity.

In classical Renaissance paintings the use of perspective points everything to the eye
of the observer. It is as if a ray of light is projected from a lighthouse, but instead of
the light being projected to the outside world what we feel is that the phenomena are
travelling towards the inside of the painting. As John Berger argues, perspective sets
the singular eye as the centre of the visible world. Everything appears in a
hierarchical ordering of space where the eye becomes the centre from which things
recede into infinity. 10 The absence of depth on the other hand makes all the elements
of the image appear to be present in an equal space. It is a space which remains
suspended out of chronological time. If perspective invites the viewer to enter the

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painting and travel inwards onto infinity (which implies the subsequent measurement
of time through movement in space), then the absence of depth renders the
redundancy of this simulation of a physical journey - everything appears as present in
the here and now. Time becomes suspended and the need for the journey ceases to be
the expansion of the borders of your visual field. If the last mountain peak in a
landscape painting invites you to travel towards that point to see what lies ahead,
then the absence of that receding point invites you to stay where you are. The
journey becomes the contemplation of the self with what is before him/her.

Can we not see the opposite action in American cinema? We can see it in the pivotal
role the pioneer plays in relation to the landscape in the construction of the national
identity in the genre of the Western. The pioneer is someone who goes beyond the
frontier into unknown territories. Through the dialectic between civilization and
nature and between the pioneer’s romantic contemplation of the open fields, a faith
in the individual rises, in contrast to the subsequent mass migration. In the Western
the landscape is not a space of memory: it becomes a space to be traversed, a space
to be conquered. The open fields receding into the background become the space
where the individual can have an ideal point of mastery. It is a geometrically ordered
space in which the pioneer and the viewer by extension are placed in the ideal
position of an eye God. The phenomena are laid out before him without the latter’s
need to situate himself before them. The world opens up for him to see and conquer.
The Western becomes the saga of an expanding nation. In their book Empire,
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri point out that the American constitution in itself
propagates this need for the constant expansion of borders. The West became the
open frontier, a vast empty area awaiting the pioneer settler. In such a narrative, the
Native Americans stood in the way. If their presence was included in the newly
formed nation then the new areas would not be empty any more, but already
occupied. Natives were thus equated with nature and seen as savages standing in the
way of civilisation. The authors make clear that such a narrative arose since the
United States did not use native Americans as labour power, in contrast to the Afro-
Americans who served as cheap labour for the building of the nation. 11

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It should be noted here that I am referring to the majority of Westerns from the
classical period of the 40s and 50s where the semi-nomadic cowboy or the
pioneering settler signifies a belief in the individual as a ruler of his destiny and an
agent who introduces culture to what was perceived as wild nature. In the American
image of the Wild West the Native Americans are a part of this landscape that awaits
intervention. John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939) is a pivotal example of this train of
thought where the Native Americans are portrayed as wild savages. The image of the
natives is radically transformed in the 1960s, especially in Sam Peckinpah’s Wild
Bunch (1969) and Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (1973) and his portrayal of Mexicans
being uprooted from their homes after the settling of the national border with
Mexico. In the last two decades Hollywood has attempted to restore the image of the
North American Indians with films like Dances with Wolves (1990). Yet this film,
which is an action-based drama, falls prey to exoticism and simplistic dualisms like
the Good Native and the Bad Settler. Special reference should be made to Jim
Jarmusch’s Dead Man (1995) where the images reflect a sense of time that the young
protagonist is absorbed into. The Native Americans cease to be melodramatic
devices and are portrayed in an almost documentary-like fashion. The landscape
ceases to be a static concrete block that sustains an action; it rather emanates a
hypnotic sense of time that refuses to be rendered as the perception of a single agent.

What we see in The Suspended Step of the Stork and throughout the wedding
sequence are phenomena that appear to be on an equal plane; they remain there as if
suspended in time. The spectator is not led through a landscape that functions as a
carpet for the movement of the actors. It is rather the other way round: the actors
become part of this landscape and the image addresses the viewer as a whole. The
wedding sequence is choreographed in such a way that the groom appears as though
the collective body of the guests had literally given birth to him. The camera records
the space along with the elements that constitute the subjectivity of the people that
inhabit the land. In contrast to the classical American Western, where natives are
objectified and equated with nature, and where nature becomes the thing to be
exploited by the pioneering white subject, what we see in The Suspended Step of the
Stork are native people who are turned into immigrants only through the rise of

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nation states. We see them claiming their subjectivity through the performance of
their rituals. The film records the rituals that have survived through the centuries and
the work becomes a fresco of different cultures in their relation to modernity whose
emergence coincides with that of the modern state. The chorus remains silent on both
sides of the border. The passage of time, the river, is the music that the politician in
rags hopes that the people will be able to hear. Words have failed him. Silence
becomes a tool for listening, a necessary tool for the production of pure optical
images like the pictures that the director provides, this being far from a romanticised
adoration of nature such as that of the bourgeoisie a hundred years before. The
attention to nature does not signify the mystification of the land that carries the seed
of a sovereign race. Fredric Jameson is quite right to point out that:

the camera is the intelligent machine which works on its own,

wishing to delve, to know more; capable also of patience and of
waiting; knowing some temporality of its own, a third temporality,
as it were, neither that of the auteur nor of character, which has that
rare capacity to sit out the time of the world until, at length, events
germinate, and slowly and unexpectedly things begin to happen at
last…things come into being and return out of it according to their
own internal rhythms or nature itself. 12

The little raft that crosses the river carrying illegal merchandise from one side of the
river to the other carries a rhythm that functions under the temporality of the shot,
independent of the development of the plot. It is a pure optical and acoustic image. A
radio is playing on the raft and the sound blends with that of the running water, while
the camera pans to the right following the movement of the raft. It is as if the cut is
designated not by the director in relation to what follows but to an internal
procession leading to its completion or suspension, accordingly. The journalist is in
search of a symbolic father. But all that the father can offer now is silence. “What are
the words that will bring the new collective dream?” This is the final sentence from
the politician’s book The Melancholia at the End of the Century. Instead of a
definitive answer the spectator is carried through a cinematic landscape made up of

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images which linger on the recording of physical reality on the river flowing through
the middle of the refugee area, on the big river that separates the two countries, the
old streets that are falling into ruin, the cafes, the derelict hotels, the stone houses
that are recurrent in all of Angelopoulos’ films from Reconstruction.

Despite this, we should bear in mind that the serenity of the landscape and the visual
pleasure of the shot also contain the silence of the bride, whose white figure as part
of the landscape quite probably contrasts with her psychology. We as spectators
know that the bride was instinctively attracted to Alexandros with whom she had a
brief love affair. It is she who at an earlier point in the narrative reveals that she has
been promised to her husband since she was ten years old. This statement provides a
completely different reading to the wedding sequence. It reveals the state of a woman
who grows up in a small community and is forced to accept the laws of a patriarchal
order. At the end of the ritual in yet another majestic shot, the camera frames her
from behind while she is waving her wedding handkerchief to the groom who stands
on the other side of the river. This dialectic between the psychology of the bride and
her function in the ritual, deprived of her feelings, gives a strong sense of ambiguity
to the image.

Alexandros is recording the ritual for his TV documentary, yet it is as if the truth of
the event cannot be captured within one narrative. It is as though Angelopoulos were
commenting on the inability to achieve an all-encompassing narrative and the endless
disquiet generated by that awareness. Angelopoulos delivers some of his most
majestic and stunning images and simultaneously downplays their function. The
sequence is not an apotheosis of traditional values; it is not the apotheosis of a
collectiveness that carries the essence of history fighting against an oppressor in
promise of eternal bliss. It is rather the wish for that bliss, the satisfaction that man
draws from a visual composition that registers the absence of a superstructural truth.
It is also the direct register of a melancholia generated by the increasing number of
national borders that restrict the movement of people who as in The Travelling
Players find that their power to act as individuals or as a small scale group falls prey
to decisions made on a larger scale.

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In Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, Elizabeth Vogler refuses or is unable to speak but her
state of illness, although cruel, proves more enduring than the phenomenal healthy
attitude of nurse Alma whose clinging on to language cannot prevent her collapse.
Susan Sontag in her essay Persona suggests the silence of Elizabeth Vogler as
carrying a mistrust towards language, the failure of the word in communication
Language turns into a weapon but proves futile in the attempt to transcend the game
of overlapping masking that the two characters play. Language is anything but a
means of communication: it is rather an object of cruelty. In Persona the absences of
utterance become more potent than words. Sontag remarks: “The person who places
uncritical faith in words is brought down from relative composure and self-
confidence to hysterical anguish.” 13

The politician who has gone missing in The Suspended Step of the Stork resides in
silence; his disappearance is the ultimate act of a willing silence. He leaves in a state
of sickness and he also abandons public language. His disappearance reflects an act
of disbelief in his function as an orator and a public persona. It also reflects the
disbelief towards parliamentary democracy as a system that can foster a radical
change in a society dominated by the laws of free market. All that is left of him at the
end of the film is a poem on an answering machine. The parliamentary democracy
that he served sprang out of the realms of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment
project stood for the radical emancipation of humans from a transcendental heavenly
authority that set its laws on earth. What came to be known as humanism, the notion
that there exist transcendental values that humans share on a universal level and
which can be accessed through logic, established a belief in a linear historical
progress where the subject can foresee and control his/her destiny both on a personal
and a social level. The politician, who belongs to a system of thought that stands for
progress, disappears as though he were admitting that the project of the
Enlightenment failed. Anthony Giddens points out that:

The notion that more knowledge about social life equals greater
control over our fate is false…Expanding our understanding of the

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 social world might produce a progressively more illuminating grasp
of human institutions and hence, increasing ‘technological’ control
over them, if it were the case either that social life were entirely
separate from human knowledge about it or that knowledge could
be filtered continuously into the reasons for social actions,
producing step by step increases in the rationality of behaviour in
relation to specific needs. Four factors prevent both conditions from
actualising which makes the goal of the Enlightenment fall short.
The differential power that is available to those in power that place
it in the service of sectional interests, the change of value orders
since shifts in outlook deriving from inputs of knowledge have a
mobile relation to changes in value orientations. The third factor is
the unintended consequences that are produced from the very act of
expanding the knowledge on social reality since that knowledge is
not separate from the object of study as it is in natural sciences. 14

Giddens concludes that there is no stable world to know, but that knowledge of that
world contributes to its unstable or mutable character. It is as if the orator is
suffering from the nausea of this instability and the only political act that can stand
up to his point of ethics is to abandon the system and move into the sphere of non-
identity. Social theory cannot change the world, as little as a film can. Mastroianni’s
poem that was left on the answering machine was written by the director himself.
The politician has become a recluse, a sick man. Reflecting upon modernity is not
put on hold; what has been suspended is a use of language that fosters an empty
political discourse as untrustworthy. Angelopoulos does not suggest reclusiveness
as the antipode of social analysis is futile, nor even that the images are innocent in
relation to language. It is quite the contrary as demonstrated by the force that the
television crew places upon the politician’s wife. All that is left of the politician are
some witnesses reporting his unidentified presence in places scattered over a
timespan of ten years. The parliamentary democracy that he served is unable to
provide a vision to bring the word that will start a new collective dream. It is

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evident that both he and the director place a critical negation on the identification of
truth with the word of the party or a metalanguage.

The Mastroianni figure encountered at the border is a recluse who speaks in parables.
He somehow resembles the mystic fool from Tarkovsky’s Nostalgia (1983). He
heralds a great migration, thus equating humanity with the non-identity of the
nomad. It is as if the politician turns into a Borgesian figure from the realm of Tlon,
Uqbar, Orbis, Tertius, where the reader encounters a world separated into two
hemispheres. In the southern hemisphere of the planet in Borges’ work, the use of
nouns was never invented. Nouns reflect established fixed identities.

As I have demonstrated to be the case in Megalexandros, identities point at things as

they are, not things as they might be or as we wish they were. An identity does not
define the subject per se. It rather defines the bourgeois identification of subjectivity
with identity. I am a doctor, I am Greek. These are categorisations that presuppose
the I in contrast with the other. I am a Greek therefore I am different from a Turk.
The idea of identity also generates difference. I am a separate individual that belongs
to a group consisting of separate individuals that form a collective under an abstract
banner, which is also static. This group is defined through the differences with
another group and their relation remains external. The idea of identity, of the notion
that I am separate from the world and that the world consists of quantifiable
phenomena that can be studied individually and in relation to one another, comes
from one basic function.

As John Holloway points out, this function is the separation of doing (human
activity) from done, the fracture of the social flow of doing into reified commodities.
The rupture of the social world of doing separates the doers whose work is
transformed into labour where the product of their work becomes an object with a
monetary value. The object becomes independent from the doer; it has its own value
that follows the laws of the market. It becomes a thing with a quantifiable value. In
such a process the thing does not change. It is therefore static, seemingly eternal and
finally rules over humans whose interpersonal relations are ruled by quantifiable

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objects that have a price - commodities. Such a system generates only quanta instead
of qualities. Identity becomes the formation of subjectivity as separate from the
world. This implies a particular linguistic function where nouns rule over verbs. The
verb denotes the changeability of the noun. Something that is through the verb goes
beyond itself - it moves. It articulates doing instead of being. Being on the other hand
presupposes an objective world described in third person singular, the world of it-is.
As Holloway points out:

There is no room for the subjunctive in the scientific discourse of

identitarian thought. If we are excluded then our dreams and wishes
and fears are excluded too. The subjunctive mood, the mood of
uncertainties, anxieties, longings, possibilities, the mood of the not
yet, has no place in the world of objectivity. The language of the
world of ‘that’s-the-way-things-are’ is firmly in the indicative
mood. 15

In the mythical story that Mastroianni recounts to the girl, everybody will eventually
become an immigrant and this will come from the tendency to self-destruction that
possesses humans. The immigrant is a person on the move. He/she goes beyond the
borders of an ethnic identity. Holloway specifies that certain identities depending on
socio-historical circumstances acquire subversive political connotations. Saying that
I am black in the United States during the sixties in the middle of the civil rights
movement at a time where the rights to citizenship were the ownership of the white
Caucasian subject has a very different reading than saying that I am black in Sweden
during the same period. The immigrant challenges the identity of a pure nationalist
state. His/her presence marks the continuous movement of groups beyond borders
and provides an identity in flux, in constant formation. Angelopoulos opens up into
the world of the not yet. The film becomes visionary through the mapping of an
uncertain landscape. As in the previous films the boundaries between objective and
subjective discourses collapse into a semi-subjective narrative. The world that
appears is not a world of objective phenomena. It includes the discourse of the
director, his signature that comes to the foreground not only through the erasure of

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depth as in the wedding sequence but also through the final sequence where the
music directs the poetical ascendance of the men in yellow raincoats on the poles in
order to reposition the missing wire. The image is not safe, or locked into a given
meaning but rather opens up to a multitude of perceptions and different readings. The
image remains contemporary in its ability to be reinterpreted in the now. The use of
the internal rhythm of the shot delivers optical and sound images independent of the
plot and the spectator is asked to invest his senses or his intellect in order to relate to
them.

Can we not see the same uncertainty principle in the disappearance of the politician?
When Alexandros meets up with him towards the end of the film he takes a tape
recorder out of his pocket and plays the recorded poem that the politician left on his
wife’s answering machine ten years ago, right before he disappeared. We then see
the recluse lifting the arm of his coat and then going up to the edge of the river as if
he were trying to catch a fish. Just as it seems he is about to utter a word, an army
jeep arrives breaking the climax of a definitive answer. There is no doubt though that
the man in rags is the herald of something new that is in search of words.

Alexandros is searching for a symbolic father. But the Mastroianni figure is far from
the signification of the symbolic father that represents a political avant-garde. There
is nothing more passive than the persona of the immigrant. However, his silence
turns into an act of resistance. The collective consciousness of the sovereign body
seems to have entered a post-memory period, so evident already from Voyage to
Cythera. Now it is the consciousness of the excluded trying to find a voice through
silence. Jameson notes that “no genuinely or radically different culture can emerge
without a radical modification of the social system from which culture itself
springs.” 16 This radical modification is far from being achieved.

The Suspended Step of the Stork starts off from a state of radical uncertainty of any
subjective position. The absence of grand ideologies brings about a new state of
waiting. The film portrays the village as a station for the immigrants although it is
forbidden to board the train that recurrently appears on the screen. Ironically they

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have taken refuge in train carriages that are out of use. The immobility of the train
wagons is dialectically contrasted with the movement of the camera as it tracks down
a line revealing boxed figures in rags. The shot inevitably carries a self-reflexive
comment already evident from Reconstruction. The director has the power to make a
film but this in itself is reduced to a distant portrayal of something that lies outside
his power. He remains an outsider. All he can do is include the voice of their
repression. As Frederic Jameson points out, realism in film is designated from the
originating presence of a group whose experience has been linguistically ‘repressed’
and ‘marginalised’. 17

Benedict Anderson points out that the Greek nation state was formed under the
doctrines of Adamantios Korais who in the early 19th century envisioned the new
nation as rising from a state of sleep, meaning that the Greeks had been in a cultural
hibernation under the rule of the Ottomans for four hundred years and now it was
time for them to embrace their roots. These roots stem all the way from antiquity in a
continuous thread. 18 Following a process of homogenisation like any other national
state, the new state enforced a common language and a common religion. Those who
refused to embrace the new dogma were either driven over the border or prosecuted.
Two hundred years later The Suspended Step of the Stork portrays the movement of
people beyond borders which has reached a standstill. Their presence is a reminder
of all the people forming a fresco that resembles something closer to a map from
Hellenistic times rather than one represented by a collective sovereign body. Again
as Jameson points out it is not that Angelopoulos is fighting the idea of the nation in
toto. In The Travelling Players he attempted to represent the historical events which
have shaped the identity of postwar Greece, which since Voyage to Cythera seem to
have passed into a state of post history where the conflict of the big ideologies has
ceased, giving space to a state of almost collective amnesia. Voula in Voyage turns
totally towards her body as a form of rescue, as the only means of feeling something
and the Beekeeper betrayed by his final attempt to believe in the body resolves to
commit suicide. In Landscape the hand of God as it is raised from the sea is missing
its index finger. It is this finger that creates Adam in Michelangelo’s ceiling painting
of the Sistine Chapel.

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It is in this space marked by the end of the grand ideologies of the Left that the
Mastroianni character appears. It would be tempting to compare the Angelopoulian
recluse with the man who escapes from the cave in Plato’s mythical story in Politeia
(Republic). In the myth, the chained man escapes from the cave where the rest of
humanity remains staring at shadows projected on the wall of the cave, believing
them to be the real world. The escaped man encounters the real substance of things
outside the cave, at the level of ideas and on returning to the cave attempts to
convince the rest of their illusion. Nobody believes him. Plato concludes that the
empirical world, the world of the senses is likewise subject to the real world, the
world of ideas. Angelopoulos of course and modern philosophy after Aristotle does
not go so far as to renounce the empirical world. Following this line of thought the
Mastroianni character functions in the role of mediator between two worlds. Vassilis
Rafailides points out that through Baumgarden and his Aesthetics of 1750 where he
expressed the concept of imagination as the mediator between the physical world and
the ideal, Hegel was able to “put in motion the Idea which moves ceaselessly from
heaven to earth and backwards. As the spirit descends, it materialises, it provides
matter to the world of the senses and as it is ascending, it spiritualises the senses
placing them back to their starting point.” 19

The work of art comes into being during the descent, while the effects of the work
will be during the ascension where it is available for the human spirit. As Rafailides
argues, the Mastroianni character signifies exactly that: the use of imagination as a
mediator between the empirical world and the world of ideas. Whenever the past or
reality approaches him, he vanishes. When the journalist plays the recorded message
to the Mastroianni character he makes a choice to move to the realm of imagination
and to the level of the myth: he disappears.

We should however bear in mind that the lost politician returns as an immigrant, as a
person without identity. His world is that of a mythical dimension beyond identities.
Similarly his wife fails to recognise him on the bridge; she renounces the logic of the
obvious, keeping to the myth of her memory. If we were to follow Rafailides we

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would have to admit that the mythical recluse is a propagator of an idea, of
something that already is, something that was lost and that we must return to. The
idea of the Spirit as being there and descending into the world of the senses gives
priority to the order of ideas. It is an abstract order, a preformulated thought applied
to the senses. What is more, it accepts the dichotomy between two worlds that need
mediation. What I have been saying throughout this thesis however is that what we
have in the films of Angelopoulos is the breakdown of the objective/subjective realm
into an indistinguishable one. The world of imagination and the real world become as
one.

What we have in the image of the Mastroianni character is not the return of an idea.
It is an invitation to a new becoming, an evolution to a flowing realm where the idea
is not somewhere outside us but is part of our doing. Mastroianni returns as an
immigrant but the immigrant is always at a process of becoming. His/her identity
changes, evolves into something else. And if doing is too closely associated with
physical action, then the word that we should use is imagining.

At the end of the film, men in yellow raincoats restore the poles with the missing
wire. The sequence is full of poetic resonance. The synchronised, one could even say
liturgical ascent of the uniformed men is accompanied by Karaindrou’s elliptical
music score while the camera performs a lateral tracking movement which opens up
our visual field to the sky behind the poles. The frontal perspective erases the depth
of the shot and the men hanging from the poles seem to be stuck onto the sky with
the rising sun. The iconic landscape delivers a world suspended in time. Yet it is not
a permanent suspension. The rising sun implies a time of transition. It gives the
sensation of waking from a dream where the borders between reality and the dream
are blurred. The wire moves beyond the framed brackets of the shot as if erasing its
borders. Alexandros at the bottom of the poles looks in another direction - towards
the lens of the receding camera that floats on the water as if receding towards the
other side of the river. This is the first time that the camera crosses the natural border
of the river and it is as though the camera that was on Alexandros’ trail and at times
even acted as a substitute for his vision has now become something else. The camera

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engages the point of view of those beyond the borders and looks straight at
Alexandros and the men on the poles. Yet we as viewers become part of this gaze,
we are placed in the position of the other. It is in this suspended time during the
breakdown of the borders, when the gaze of the other meets the gaze of Alexandros
and that of the director in mutual recognition, that the Stork is left free to imagine the
next step.

1
Κωνσταντίνος Θέμελης, Θόδωρος Αγγελόπουλος: Το παρελθόν ως Ιστορία, το Μέλλον ως Φόρμα,
Ύψιλον/βιβλία, Αθήνα, 1998, pp.136-137.
2
The concept of the not yet was first formulated by the Marxist theorist of utopia, Ernst Bloch (1885-
1977). Bloch criticized traditional Marxist critiques of culture for their negative value on ideology.
Bloch saw utopian elements sustaining the view for change in the current social conditions as also
being embedded in works quickly dismissed as ideological. The Marxist critic ought to point out these
elements that for Bloch signify the road towards socialism. He saw these utopian elements as being
falsify played out and negotiated through bourgeois ideology and thus deprived of their revolutionary
potential. He saw utopia as concrete in the here and now rather than abstractly projected in the future.
Bloch stood for a positive evaluation of the everyday that goes hand in hand with a radical criticism of
negation. See Ernst Bloch, The Spirit of Utopia, trans. Antonym Nassar, Stanford University Press,
Stanford, 2000. for an introductory reading see the on line article: Douglas Kellner, Ernst Bloch-
Ideology and Utopia, [Link]
My own usage of the term comes from the later formulation by John Holloway who has adopted the
term from Bloch. See footnote 3.
3
To put it simply, when one makes a film the film is not a finished product that sits autonomous and
separate from a social state of doing. The film is part of a web. One makes a film because one wants
one’s film to be seen. The act of seeing is social - it reintroduces the filmmaker and the viewer in a
communal flow. This of course should not be confused with functionality. If nobody sees the film it
does not mean that the act is not social. As John Holloway points out: There are many doings that do
not in turn create conditions for the doing of others that do not feed back into the social flow of doing
as a whole…My activity is social, whether or not anybody reads this. The act of wanting to do
something which is seen by others is an act that changes me through consciously projecting upon the
future. Doing is not an instinctual act, as in let’s say the society of bees where doing is a process of
instinctual reproduction. Human doing presupposes a going beyond one state of things towards what
is not yet. What is not yet then is not a matter of the future; it becomes inherent in every act of the
now if every act is seen as historically situated. Subjectivity becomes the notion of being able to do
what does not yet exist. See John Holloway, Change The World Without Taking Power, Pluto Press,
London, 2002, p. 22-27.
4
Paul Virilio, The Vision Machine, Indiana University Press London: British Film Institute,
Bloomington, 1994, p. 33.
5
In his essay The work of Art at the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Benjamin envisions the rise of
a new technical school of viewers through the advent of the Soviet Avant Garde in cinema. The new
viewer is also a potential creator through the redistribution of the means of production that are now in
the hands of the people. Cinema also signals a grand shift in the terms of ownership and distribution.
One cannot buy a film since it is an industrial product. The life of a film depends on distribution, on
the actual attendance of the masses. The work of art becomes potentially free from previous forms of

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ownership and its power lies within the people. The most essential concept that comes through
Benjamin’s essay is that of the liquidation of the aura of the work of art emanating from its uniqueness
in space and time into a multitude of copies where the concept of the original loses all sense. The
work of art loses its mystification and its distance from the viewer, a distance which was the result of
the work’s singular presence in space and time (a fresco in the ceiling of a cathedral for example). It
was a distance that placed the viewer as the singular beholder of an objective world that appeared
before him as if he were the centre of the world. The reproduced work instead presents a world broken
down into a myriad of view points that now travel towards the masses instead of waiting to be seen at
a permanent space that endures in time. Unfortunately according to Benjamin the capitalist mode of
production hides this radical change and constantly resituates the lost aura of the work of art through
an industry that supports the status quo. The industry establishes a distribution and consumption
network around the work so that the work still seems distant. The star system in Hollywood is one
such example where the mystifying concept of the star rises with the support of the industry through
means of advertisement rather through the immanent elements that constitute the film itself.
We should bear in mind though that Benjamin wrote the essay well before the advent of the Second
World War. The liquidation of the aura at the beginning of the 21st century along with the loss of
origins and the idea of a unified subject in the stage of multi-cooperation capitalism can acquire a
complete different reading. One might say that the dissolution of the subject becomes the excuse for
capitalism’s corporate model. Therefore we should be careful in our reading of Benjamin today. In
terms of filmmaking the individual in a Hollywood industry becomes a shuttering presence that breaks
the norms of established structures. What I am talking about in this essay is not the dissolution of the
subject in toto but rather of a subject as a unique monad that remains unaltered or travelling towards a
universal ahistorical essence. We see the subject as energetic, as self-determining but always evolving
in communion and cooperation with others. The terms memory and history are still meaningful and
are not deconstructed in mere fictional narratives. The breakdown of a dominant narrative does not
leave about an absolute relativism of free floating stories that are equal in a universal level. The
necessity for emancipation creates a path, a path that is marked through the study of the past.
See Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art at the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ in Film Theory and
Criticism, ed. Leo Braudy-Marshall Cohen, Oxford University Press, New York – Oxford, 1999, pp.
731-751.
6
Angelopoulos notes that the sequence with the family reunion is inspired by an episode of his own
life when his father returned home after the family thought he had been executed by leftwing
guerrillas in the Battle of Athens right before the official eruption of the Greek civil war. According to
the director his father had attempted to stay neutral. See interview with Public Relations Managers for
Merchant-Ivory in Θόδωρος Αγγελόπουλος, ed. Ειρήνη Στάθη, Φεστιβάλ Κινηματογράφου
Θεσσαλονίκης - Εκδόσεις Καστανιώτη, 2000, p-189.
7
In Jean Luc Godard’s Éloge de l’amour the main character Edgar (Bruno Putzulu) while standing in
front of the Renault car factory with his back to the camera delivers the line: The State is unable to
love. The Renault factory is an iconic building for the events associated with May ’68.
8
John Gould, Myth, Ritual, Memory and Exchange: Essays in Greek Literature and Culture, Oxford
University Press, Oxford, 2001, p. 86.
9
John Gould, ibid. p. 87.
10
John Berger, Ways of Seeing, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1972, p. 16-17.
11
Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri, Empire, Harvard University Press, Cambridge-Mass, 2000, pp.
226-241.
12
Fredric Jameson, ‘The Past as History the Future as Form’ in The Last Modernist: The Films of
Theo Angelopoulos, ed. Andrew Horton, Flick Books, Trowbridge, 1997, p. 83.
13
Susan Sontag, ‘Bergman’s Persona’ in Styles of Radical Will, Vintage, London, 2001, p.144.
14
Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, Cambridge, Polity, 1990, p. 92.
15
John Holloway, Change the World Without Taking Power, Pluto Press, London, 2002, p. 61.
16
Fredric Jameson, Signatures of the Visible, Routledge, New York ; London, 1992 p. 161.
17
Fredric Jameson, Signatures of the Visible, p. 167.
18
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism,
Verso, London, 1983, p.72.
19
Βασίλης Ραφαηλίδης, ‘Το Μετέωρο Βήμα του Πελαργού’ in Ελληνικός Κινηματογράφος: Κριτική
1965-1995, Αιγόκερως, Αθήνα, 1995, p. 255.

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258
 ULYSSES’ GAZE / ΤΟ ΒΛΕΜΜΑ ΤΟΥ ΟΔΥΣΣΕΑ

Ulysses’ Gaze starts with images from The Weavers, a reel shot by the Manaki
brothers, possibly in the 1910s. An old woman is weaving cloth. She stares at the
lens not with astonishment but without doubt with the emotion of facing something
new. But is it only that she is facing a new experience or is it that her image is also
new for the contemporary audience? The grainy image has a sense of tangibility
that together with the absence of sound provide the static shot with the dreamlike
nature of a reality retrieved as if from another world. While these images unravel, a
voiceover asks: “Is this the first gaze?”

We find out in the next sequence that there are, in fact, three further reels shot at an
even earlier date than that of the film of the weavers. The voiceover is that of A., a
film director facing a personal and professional crisis, who has embarked on a
journey through the Balkans in the middle of the Yugoslavian war. He is in search
of three lost reels shot by the Manaki brothers, two documentarists who worked at
the beginning of the 20th century.

The reels are the first filmic footage ever shot in the Balkans. A.’s trip takes him on
a double journey: a geographic one, through a Balkans at war with a bombed
Sarajevo as its final geographical destination; and a temporal one, revisiting his
past, the history of the Manaki brothers and the history of the Balkans. Time splits
open, with one vector pointing towards the future and other delving into the past.

In this chapter I will attempt to outline how Angelopoulos deals with the concepts of
time and memory through an approach that does not treat the image as a ‘given’ to be
illustrated, but as an open field where questions on perception and representation are
asked. This approach leads me to question the director’s insistence on the use of long
takes and their function as memory vessels in a film that wants to raise hope in the
middle of the ongoing war in the former Yugoslavia. Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the

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time image provides a useful construct for speaking about the film’s focus on the
personal past of A. and the historical past of the Balkans.

The opening sequence of the film, which stands as a haiku prefacing the rest, is also
a remarkable illustration of the convergence of the director’s approach with
Deleuze’s reflection on film and time. The Thessaloniki tableau starts with a fade-in
on a tracking shot accompanied by a voice offscreen which says: “It was that winter
of ’54 when Yannakis Mannakis saw a blue ship moored in the harbour of Salonica. I
was his assistant back then. He had a longing to photograph it as it sailed. One
morning the ship set sail…” As we listen to the voice, the camera reveals an old
photographer, dressed in fifties clothing, and his assistant (in contemporary clothes),
who turns out to be the source of the voice over. A blue ship makes an entrance in
the background, at sea, from the right side of the frame, and simultaneously, within
the visual field of the photographic lens. At this point, Yannakis clutches his heart.
His assistant comes to his aid and calmly places the dying man on a chair behind
him.

The assistant then starts walking towards the place where the camera began the
tracking shot. The camera follows him while he addresses someone off screen to the
right. The tracking movement reveals the presence of A., who seems to have been
watching all along from off-screen to the right. A. moves to the left. Passing his
assistant, he takes the camera’s focus along with him, and ‘forces’ it to reverse. As
he returns to the edge of the bay, however, the old photographer’s body is no longer
to be seen, and neither is his photographic equipment. The camera captures the blue
ship while A. is still framed gazing out at it. Karaindrou’s non-diegetic musical
theme is introduced as the camera zooms in to isolate the ship. [Link] left outside the
frame.

In the above sequence, one long take presents a time span of forty years within a
uniformity of time and space in the representational field. The camera moves back
and forth as if moving in time. Yannakis Manakis died in 1954 and A. is standing in
the same place in 1994, in the diegetic present. The assistant is standing by the old

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photographer yet he is himself old and dressed in the clothes of the present. His walk
in the bay marks a passage in time. The camera starts with a fade-in at a certain point
in time, but it does not start from A.. Rather, it goes to him after we have seen the
photographer, after the oral testimony of an eyewitness. What we experience in this
sequence is not a linear narrative where past, present, and future are segments that
succeed each other on a horizontal scale. There is no division between subjective and
objective points of view that would, in turn, authorise the external reality of
establishing shots to include the subjectivity of the internal point of views.

A standard way of filming the sequence would be to connect the old photographer
with the memory of either the assistant or A. This would be designated by breaking
up the sequence into a succession of shots that would form a flashback. The
flashback usually refers to the subjectivity of the character who is experiencing a
recollection. It consists of a hierarchical arrangement, where the recollection is
subordinated to and bracketed by the objective shots of a character thinking, or by an
objective present action that needs an explanation from the past in order to progress.
The flashback, in turn, serves as a break that verifies the organic movement of the
plot towards the future. It is usually designated by, for example, a dissolve or a fade-
in.

The Thessaloniki Bay sequence, however, is not a flashback. The ship is seen
simultaneously from the point of view of the photographer A. and the point of view
of the camera. The uniformity of space throughout the timespan is not a designation
of time launching forth to the future, in other words the palindrome movement. The
sequence is a pure ‘time image’ where time is not integral to subjectivity but rather
the opposite: consciousness is internal and constituted by time. This latter, which I
believe is revealed in the Thessaloniki sequence, is Deleuze’s reading of Bergson.

Starting from Bergson’s notion of the durée, Deleuze outlines the notion of a time
crystal of an indivisible unity between an actual image and its virtual image where a
non- chronological past is preserved:

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 What is actual is always a present. But the present changes or passes. It
becomes past when it no longer is, when a new present replaces it. It is
clearly necessary for it to pass on for the new present to arrive, and it is
clearly necessary for it to pass at the same time as it is present. […]
Since the past is constituted not after the present that it was but at the
same time, time has to split itself in two at each moment as present and
past, which differ from each other in nature, or, what amounts to the
same thing, it has to split the present in two heterogeneous directions,
one of which is launched towards the future while the other falls into
the past. 1  

A virtual image is not a psychological or a dream image, it is a mental image

reconstructed in consciousness not according to a chronological succession: a new
image that appears without relation to the present it once was. So we have the
present as the actual image and the past, which is contemporaneous, as a virtual or
mirror image. This can be experienced in everyday life in moments of déjà-vu where
perception and recollection happen simultaneously. This recollection does not
belong to a past of a once-actual present, nor does it have to be actualised in a virtual
present of a personal recollection.

Although the Thessaloniki sequence contains evident marks of historical time, it is

the image of the ship that becomes an image of an objective virtual past
contemporaneous with the present consciousness of both diegetic characters and by
extension with the camera. The ship cannot be placed in an actual historical present
or past, nor does it coincide with a particular point of view. It makes an entrance
only until it is isolated by the camera, and then passes quietly off screen to the left.
Similarly, the ship cannot be pinned down in time for it is in constant motion. The
camera and the diegetic characters all share the same point of view in what I may
describe as a shared subjectivity. It is this shared subjectivity of internal gazing that
authorises the form of the film and makes a recurrent movement from past to
present.

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The two movements described in the quote above could be said to correspond to two
vectors of the film: A. does indeed move towards Sarajevo in a horizontal line of
chronological time which is subordinated to movement. Simultaneously, however, he
moves alongside another (vertical or non-chronological) line that constitutes the
incidents wherein he takes the place of Yannakis Manakis. His quest is for the reels
that represent an age of innocence, where cinema contained the dynamics of a new
form and the hope that their acquisition would trigger a new beginning both personal
and collective. This quest places him in absolute contemporaneity with Manakis, thus
forming a shared subjectivity.

The narrative, instead of breaking into the flashback of an objective past that
constitutes the pathos of Yannakis Mannakis and his adventures in the beginning of
the century, blends this past with the subjectivity of A. Here it is movement that is
subordinated to time. The action directed at the retrieval of the reels is constantly
suspended and down-played by the memory and déjà vu images blending the past
and the present. These images are not hallucinatory images, and neither are they
designated by a dissolve or a fade to mark out a time lapse.

Angelopoulos follows the same rhythm, down-playing the linear progression of

time, throughout the film. A simple cut transfers A. to the past while he passes the
Scopian border to Bulgaria. There is something uncanny about the sequence where
he is arrested by the Bulgarian authorities. The policemen are dressed in early
twentieth century clothing and we, as viewers, realise that A., as he faces the
prosecutor who is reading him the accusations, is now Yannakis.

Is the scene a hallucination? The cut as a means to break the sequence does not help
to clarify the transition in time. Rather, it blurs the border between the real and the
imagined, between a world which is perceived as a cause and effect system and a
world of rupture where things are ambiguous. The audience can make out the
transition only in retrospect, since the passage to the questioning room does not
signify a time transition. It is only after the accusations are read that we realise that
we are in the beginning of the century. The time transition is transferred from the cut

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to the mise-en-scene. The effect is to charge the image with the potential to be
questioned. Instead of following the action, the viewer is compelled to wonder about
what it is that he/she is seeing ‘now’, and thus encouraged to be involved
intellectually rather than remaining the passive consumer of a driven action. And as
the cause for the transition is not directed to a previous agent in the narrative, the
question of its significance remains suspended.

It is as if the camera, by shifting its emphasis from the cut to the mise-en-scene, takes
on the same role of the observer trying to make out what the situation is rather than
the narrator illustrating a given story. In the Korytsa sequence the audience perceives
the sensation of an exile returning home only to face a second exile. This is brought
about by moving from the particular to the general, but the audience is not granted a
full explanation. The image is not so much an intellectual image - although the
arrangement creates an audiovisual montage where the ascetic figure is contrasted
with a wide open space surrounded by concrete, and her silence gives way to the
chanting of a hodza (Muslim priest) as signifier of the post-Communist return of
religion in Albania.

The sequence provides a sensation of deprivation, a feeling of angst among the

ruined houses. Again it opens up to the world outside of the frame, outside of the
fiction. Why is the woman at odds with the environment? Is it just because it is ugly?
The image is bleak but the viewer is not privileged to receive an explanation
connecting the scene with the history of the Greek minority in Northern Epirus. The
image simply provides a sense of loss based on the documented reality. It suggests its
meaning, but this meaning is not imposed on the viewer.

The montage works internally. It is as if the real settings will speak for themselves
the history that has been played out before them. The rendering of the truth is passed
on from the uttered word to the recorded image. The audience starts off with an
impression, and the choice of moving to the particular concepts that this impression
alludes to is left entirely up to them.

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At a later point in the narrative, the shot of the fragmented Lenin statue is taken from
a point of view that fully scrutinises it starting from a detail of the broken pointing
hand, moving to the head and then around the statue, thanks to the circular
movement of the boat that carries the statue. This movement evokes what Deleuze
has called a pure optical and sound image. 2

Deleuze uses these terms to describe the breaking down of an action-driven narrative
in which the image, in a given situation, presents the reaction of a character to a
previous cause identifiable either by him or by the audience. The optical image
creates new signs and is born, among other things, when characters face situations
where the ability of a logical response collapses. The characters then turn from active
agents to seers. The image breaks away from the continuity of a developing plot, it
serves no specific dramatic function, and its relation to the rest of the film is not one
of cause and effect but one subordinated to an internal rhythm that brings the images
together.

The image of the statue is not subordinated to an action in the way that a sequence
of shots in, say, a Hitchcock film would analyse the act of signifying a murder (as in
the shower sequence in Psycho where the set of relations in which the action and the
3
[perpetrator of the action] are caught and interpreted). In a narrative of this latter kind
the audience is usually not left with any questions as to what the images signify. By
contrast, the optical image of the Lenin statue stands for a new way of seeing, one
that poses a question of what thoughts are designated, while framing the fragmented
statue of an order that has been so rigidly signified.

The implied symbolism of the funeral, with people gathering on the banks of the
river making the sign of the cross while the boat floats by, carries an equal
signification along with a sense of astonishment while the camera insists on the
autonomous recording of this huge bulk of physical matter. Is the implied symbolism
a sign of nostalgia? Where does the finger point now and, if it still carries
significance, does it relate to the direction of the disillusioned director inside the
film? It seems that for Angelopoulos the portrayal of a world of alienation, where the

265
signs of previous ideological regimes have collapsed, leaves his main character to
wander through a world that seems like a maze.

A new beginning?

Referring to De Sica’s The Bicycle Thieves, Antonioni claimed that now that the
bicycle is no longer there, a new signification is at stake. 4 The worker in The Bicycle
Thieves had a practical, functional goal: the bicycle was a means for making a living
and for many, mostly outside the Western world, it still is. It becomes apparent that
A.’s quest for the reels is not of a practical nature. Rather, it takes the form of a vow,
in the much the same vein as offerings and pilgrimages made by religious people in
the name of a saint. As pointed up earlier, however, the ritual here does not have a
given structure of a beginning a middle and an end, for it is the autonomy of the
episodes-stations in the journey that breaking away from the evolution of the plot
like the stretches of dead time deprived of any dramatic action in autonomous
sequence shots.

The dramatic evolution of a globally dominant American film industry has

established a style of representation, a ritual that requires the meaning of a film to
be contained by the plot, the field of action where form is subordinated to story
development. This story development deploys conventions that imitate human
perception in empirical reality, thus defining naturalism as the norm. Within this
framework, every shot has a functional character as determined by the restrictions
of the plot. A shot of a clock in close up for example has its place within the
deigesis only if it is relevant to the developing action or to the characters’
psychology.

Angelopoulos clearly belongs to a different tradition. When A. is waiting for the

Archivist in his subterranean office, or when the asylum inmates make their exit
from the building in Sarajevo, what we are presented with is an optical image: the

266
camera holds a fixed frame until almost all the characters are out. There is no plot-
connected drive.

A ritual is predicated on a deliberate act of faith in a pre-existing order to bring

deliverance. As such, A. does not propel the action forward, but, rather, seems to be
recording, archiving. It is as if the boundaries of past, present, and future, or the real
and the imagined, blend to form not a relative perspective or a hallucination but a
new image, an image whose meaning is not given or rigidly identified. Nikos
Kolovos calls the cinema of Angelopoulos ritualistic 5 .Yet a ritual is based on
absolute faith in a signifying order that it tries to sustain. The choreographed
movement of the actors and the slow movement of the camera indeed make it
tempting to describe the cinema of Angelopoulos as ritualistic. The adoption of the
name ‘Ulysses’ as a universal allegory signifying life as a journey points in that
direction.

Yet the return to a past narrative does not signify the return to the same narrative.
Angelopoulos sees the end of the era of grand leaders and pays tribute to the dreams
that this historical era generated. However, we see the fragmented statue of Lenin
taken down to the river of time. Angelopoulos is not reactionary: each return to the
past takes place within a present discourse that reformulates the past as a means to
shatter the crude realism of a world presented as how things are. By denying the
discourse of a one- dimensional reality, Angelopoulos blasts apart the present with
the force of the past, and opens up a world of potentialities where possibility
becomes as real as the material, objective world which presents to us.

A possibility can be a wish for a different future. The very act of wishing changes
you whether or not the wish becomes actuality. It is also possible that the
remembrance of the past can become animated without warning. This can be seen in
the Kostanza sequence, for instance, where the image of A.’s mother entering the
frame/his mind, leads him to the family congregation for the celebration of New
Year’s Eve 1945 in an almost Proustian, involuntary manner. During their encounter

267
A. remarks: “It is somehow my footsteps that have led me here”. Once again, it is not
he who becomes the agent of the action.

It is at this celebration that the character, in his present form, meets with his family
from the past. This is not a conventional flashback because it is not a real break from
the present. A. retains his present form throughout the sequence only to return as a
child at the end. The whole sequence is performed within one long take. A greets all
of his relatives and then recedes off frame. At that moment the shot is fixed, forming
a tableau including the large hallway and the main exit.

The shot thus takes on the attributes of a theatre stage, the representation changing
from empirical realism to a Brechtian representation reminiscent of the New Year’s
Eve sequence in The Travelling Players. The father returns among the New Year’s
well wishers in 1946. We see a brief dance among the guests, and then witness the
entrance of two Stalinist security officers who, while performing a grotesque dance,
arrest A’s uncle. As the three make their exit, Uncle Vangelis proclaims a happy
1948.

The ball starts up again, and continues till the officers’ return with another group to
confiscate the property, and the guests wish each other a happy 1950 before
gathering for the family picture. The family are then about to emigrate to Greece.
Everybody stands facing the film camera, posing, and calling for A. As the camera
zooms to the photographed family, A. makes his way into the frame and takes his
position. Now he is a child again and the take ends with the camera slowly zooming
in on his face.

As the title of Angelopoulos’ first film suggests, the character is not in the past, in a
clear-cut segment of a reality that waits to be excavated intact. He is in a
reconstruction where the past comes alive from the viewpoint of a child standing as
the collective memory of a group (the Greek-Romanian ex-patriots), and it is as if the
Brechtian defamiliarisation of the actors’ movement is here identified with the
dream-like gaze and innocence of a child.

268
Again the long take is used in order to make a passage in time, to form a link. The
absence of postproduction editing that would transfer the point of the gaze within the
diegetic world inevitably draws attention to the camera itself. A personal recollection
opens up to a collective narrative. Although fragmented, it makes a link with history
not as a background, but as an assemblage that comes to the foreground through the
grotesque dance. A period of three years that signifies the end of the Greek minority
in Romania and the arrival of the new Stalinist regime is reconstructed in one take.
Time is compressed in a unified space by the wishes for a Happy New Year. As
Fredric Jameson points out:

Transitions in the modern must at one and the same time be organic and
radically arbitrary; they must document some deeper motivation at the
same time that they ostentatiously exhibit their made quality, their sheer
artificiality. 6

The final gaze of the child straight at the camera brings attention to the
representation of the materiality of the film medium. The Kostanza sequence forms
an autonomous tableau, meaning that its signification remains complete without
reference either to the end or to another point in the narrative. The appearance of A.’s
mother is arbitrary and so are the time transitions within the sequence, but on the
other hand, they are organically connected with rest of the film, not only as one
recollection in the personal saga of a journey but as a system that works with
autonomous segments and refuses to give way to an all-encompassing truth that
justifies its order as the norm.

And what else could the inner motivation of the sequence be than Benjamin’s dictum
that “History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogeneous empty time,
but time filled by the presence of the now.” 7 It seems that the new could just as well
be forgotten in the past, the significance of which acquires a new meaning after its
retrieval, like the reels that A. wishes to signify hope for the respect of the ‘other’ as
a universal ethical consensus in the face of terror. Lastly, the persistence of the

269
internal rhythm of the shot and the fixed frame that Angelopoulos employs carry
traces of an early cinema like that of the Manaki brothers, as we see in The Weavers.
It is a persistence that the director makes present not only as an attempted realist
aesthetic but also as a form of resistance to action-driven narrative as a way of
abbreviating time.

The journey of a modern Ulysses, then, is not that of the return to the homeland, at
least not one that is geographically placed on the map. The search for meaning and
identity ends its diegisis in the burning Sarajevo. Similarly, the reels of the film are
burned, leaving A. to face the camera in tears. The Manaki brothers started with the
Balkan Wars at the beginning of the century and now the human tragedy of war is
acted out again.

Does this signify the end of history? The fractured statue, the burned cinema in
Monastiri, the executions of the people in Sarajevo, and, finally, the burned foot reels
suggest an actual image of a present terror, but the virtual image of the
interconnected gaze sustains the image of the child as a sign of hope in pure
recollection. As Deleuze points out, in pure recollection we remain contemporary
with the child that we were, in much the same way as the believer feels himself
contemporary with Christ. 8

It is this contemporaneity that connects a personal world view with history for the
rise of a new collective dream. The film’s original treatment of its content through an
episodic narrative, providing space for the viewer to produce his/her meaning, thus
works as an extension of a theory of autonomy and cooperation against a dominant
master code fixing the gaze, fixing time.

1
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2-the Time Image, , trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta, London: The
Athlone Press, 1989, pp. 81-82.
2
Ibid. p. 3.
3
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1-The Movement Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam,
London: Athlone Press, 1986, p.200.

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4
Michelangelo Antonioni, Text quoted in Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2-the Time image, trans. Hugh
Tomlinson and Robert Galeta London: The Athlone Press, , 1989, p. 284.
5
Nikos Kolovos, Θόδωρος Αγγελόπουλος, Αθήνα, Αιγόκερως, 1990, p.20.
6
Fredric Jameson, ‘Theo Angelopoulos: the past as history, the future as form’ in The Last Modernist:
The Films of Theo Angelopoulos, ed. by Andrew Horton, Flick Books, England, 1997, p. 87.
7
Walter Benjamin, Theses in the Philosophy of History in Illuminations, Fontana Press, London,
1992, pp. 252-253.
8
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2-the Time Image, The Athlone Press, London, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and
Robert Galeta, 1989, p. 92. Pure recollection exists outside consciousness. For Deleuze we as subjects
are integral in time rather than time being an integral part of copiousness. Just as a physical concrete
reality exists independently of perception, so the past exists outside personal memory. It exists in a
virtual space that is preserved outside consciousness. “It is in the past as it is in itself, as it is preserved
in itself, that we go to look for our dreams or our recollections and not the opposite” (Deleuze, ibid.
p.82.). When A. visits his birth house or when he encounters his dead mother it is not as if he is
reanimating a former present that he extracts from memory. It is as if he is drawn by the virtual image
of the past which is preserved outside consciousness. The past mingles with the present in an
indiscernible image of present/past. It is A. who visits the past outside memory rather than a
subjective memory animating the past in a flashback or a dream sequence.

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272
 ETERNITY AND A DAY / MIA ΑΙΩΝΙΟΤΗΤΑ ΚΑΙ ΜΙΑ ΜΕΡΑ

Alexandros is a middle-aged writer and translator dying from cancer. We follow him
on the last day before he is admitted to hospital, as he unexpectedly becomes
involved in the adventure of a young boy immigrant. In his attempt to help the boy,
Alexandros moves in and around Thessaloniki and then all the way to the northern
borders of Greece and back again. Meanwhile, his mind constantly revisits the day
that his daughter was born and reunites with the spectre of his dead wife.

The encounter with the boy also conjures up the spectre of Greece’s national poet
Dionysios Solomos, whose unfinished poem ‘Free Besieged’ Alexandros had once
tried to complete, even though he has long since given up. Throughout the film, the
landscape of the present is constantly disrupted by past memories and longings,
questioning the possibility of redemption both on a personal and on a wider social
level. Moving within the temporal confines of a single day, Alexandros finds himself
on the threshold between life and death. The film shows his attempt to break through
the confines of the present while in search of redemption.

In his famous essay, Mourning and Melancholia (1917) Sigmund Freud positions the
subject who suffers the shock of a loss as having to go through either a state of
melancholia or a process of mourning. Freud is explicit about the disparate nature of
the two. 1 Mourning is the subject’s reaction to the loss of a loved person or of some
abstract notion such as one’s liberty or ideal. It is a process where libido is
withdrawn from a lost object. This withdrawal, however, cannot be enacted at once.
Rather, it is a gradual process by which the subject eventually declares the object
dead and moves on to invest his libido in new objects.

Melancholia, on the other hand, takes place when the subject remains faithfully
attached to the lost object. It is a state of mourning without end – hence its
description as a pathological and negative state. Nevertheless, David L. Eng and

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David Kazanjian provide a different reading in their essay Mourning Remains, trying
to detach the state of melancholia from its negative connotations and see it as an
active process in both the personal and the social sphere. 2 The authors see that,
through melancholia as described by Freud, the past does not remain fixed. They
remark, furthermore, that melancholia – as a refusal of closure – provides “a method
for interpreting loss as a creative process.” 3 Through the melancholic attachment to
loss, the past may come alive in the present. It is not a fixed past that is over and
done with through mourning; it is a psychic topos that can shape and influence the
present.

It is through this prism that my reading of Eternity and a Day becomes an attempt to
trace the psychic topos of the film. Melancholia is a word that has been overused in
relation to Angelopoulos. 4 However, it is always either charged with the negativity
of pathology or with the pride of fallen aristocrats who take narcissistic pleasure in
their intellectual elitism in an attempt to ‘mourn’ the disintegration of the Left ideal
after the fall of the Communist states. The individual wanderer in the films of
Angelopoulos is taken to be a stand-in for what amounts to a universal antihero, his
identity loaded with metaphysical connotations.

I would not deny that Angelopoulos articulates a humanist discourse with universal
elements. Indeed, his film points out the need for a new universal ideal. However,
this ideal becomes one where the other is not erased or homogenised. Here, as in
Megalexandros, Angelopoulos presents a landscape that makes visible the gaps of
any grand narrative and the dead end of high idealism. What takes its place is a
notion of responsibility towards the other, towards difference. Furthermore, my
claim is that the melancholia that permeates the free indirect discourse of the film is
also a material account of the body in pain suffering both from a terminal illness and
from the loss of a loved person. The notion of melancholia as a refusal to let go of
the past becomes a critical and affective tool that constantly influences the present.
To paraphrase Walter Benjamin, the film becomes a psychic topos that “seizes hold
of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.” 5

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The ‘moment of danger’ in Eternity and a Day is the terminally ill body. It is also the
absence of a political agenda on the Left, along with a landscape of lost homes and
wandering immigrants. The translator-poet whose gaze marks the space of the filmic
narrative is an intellectual with a Socialist agenda. In a manner reminiscent of
Professor Borg in Bergman’s Wild Strawberries (1957), Alexandros revisits his past
within the temporal confines of a single day, the last day before he is admitted to
hospital with terminal cancer. During that day, Angelopoulos places the dying writer
in a direct encounter with a boy immigrant in search of a home.

The film starts with Alexandros, right before he is admitted to hospital, passing by
his daughter’s flat to make some final arrangements. He then visits his housekeeper
to hand over his dog, in the manner of a modern Ulysses embarking on his final
journey. (In the ancient epic, Odysseus leaves his dog with the shepherd Eumaios
immediately before his departure for Troy.) In a familiar Angelopoulian manner, the
signification of the ancient myth is deconstructed. The journey is not that of a king
conquering a foreign land. Similarly, the ritual of homecoming is not the privilege of
a mythical hero whose arrival signifies the sovereignty of a nation. Rather, it is a
journey towards death, marked by the desire to break away from its annihilating grip.
It takes place, not over years, but within the confines of a single day.

Furthermore, the hero’s journey is associated with the thousands of wandering

immigrants who are unable to return, caught between borders as we saw in The
Suspended Step of the Stork. In his final journey towards death, Alexandros sits
immobile inside his car after giving his dog away – drained of life and staring out on
emptiness. At that moment, the boy appears and the spirit seems to return to
Alexandros’ body. One of the hundreds of illegal immigrant children who clean car
windscreens at traffic lights (their only way of earning a living), the boy reawakens
in Alexandros the will to live. This is not, however, the superhuman will of a
romantic spirit. A quest for redemption in the face of death, suitable for the most
metaphysical and romantic of quests, the hero’s journey remains both material and
mortal.

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The triumph of the spirit is always balanced by the sufferings of the body. After each
encounter with the past, when Alexandros is reunited with his dead wife, we see him
wandering in the streets of Thessaloniki. As the film progresses, he becomes more
feeble and exhausted – as in the port sequence, where the young boy collects words
as Alexandros leans over a bench and clutches at his chest. His doctor, who happens
to pass by, is another reminder of death. The short interlude of collecting words ends
in silence.

Similarly, it is silence that marks both the beginning and the end of Alexandros’
encounter with the boy – giving their story a circular structure. During the first
encounter, Bruno Ganz (who plays Alexandros) is shot in a manner reminiscent of
his role as Cassiel, the angel in Wenders’ Wings of Desire (1987). A tracking shot
from a high angle scans his face in despair, while the lights from the shop windows
cast layers of red on the windscreen of his car. This reflects the introduction of the
two angels in Wenders’ film, as they sit inside a car in a display window. During that
same sequence, as the car rotated together with the camera that was placed on top of
it, Wenders evoked a sense of playfulness – as if one were seated on a merry-go-
round. It is there, in that space, that the desire to become mortal filled Cassiel/Ganz
with a sense of inexplicable joy.

The angels roam the skies above Berlin, a city divided in two. We the viewers are
left watching the West side, as it struggles with the ghosts of its Nazi past as well as
the side-effects of its postwar economic miracle: frantic working rates and increased
production of commodities, both of which suppress any effort at self-introspection.
The angels fly over a city fully immersed in capitalism – aware, as we can see from
the opening sequence, that it is far from being a paradise on earth. Nevertheless,
Wenders refuses to lament. Far from being ironic about utopian idealism, the
German director wants to capture its positive drive and powerful will to live. He can
embrace the contradictions of life in Berlin at the end of the 80s, as his angels
indulge in metaphysical speculations inside a car salesroom.

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Angelopoulos brings the angel of Wings of Desire back to his starting point. Now he
is a mortal, but a very different one from his character in the sequel Faraway So
Close (1993) where Cassiel is happily married. In Eternity and a Day, the angel is
about to die and the spirit seems absent from his face that stares into emptiness. It is
the boy who will activate his will to live – yet after he leaves for Italy, we find
Alexandros alone again, in his car in the middle of the road.

The transcendence of the film into the realm of the ideal is also downplayed by two
later shots. One is the shot of the airplane that passes above the quay, interrupting the
daydream of Alexandros. The plane carries an advertisement for the National Bank
of Greece, which was one of the sponsors of the film. This is another signification of
time forking in the narrative. It is time as value that breaks into the narrative in a
bleak autonomous image. It is an index of the birth of a film, together with the giant
poster of the same sponsor that forces the camera’s gaze into the background (rather
than on the wandering Ganz) at a later point in the narrative.

As signifiers of time, these moments are equal to the encounters with Solomos or
Alexandros’ wife. It is the spectre that haunts the director or any author. It is the
cruel admittance that film is also a commodity, together with the blunt affirmation of
the death of the avant-garde. The airplane breaks the fleeting image of the ship and
ends the memory sequence. This is not the trace of a Brechtian Gest breaking the
evolution of the drama; it is only an advertisement. Yet even on these grounds, the
film aches for transgression and so does the viewer.

The film is a search for home through a melancholic gaze. The double register of this
melancholia – both critical and monumental, to put it in Nietzschean terms – is what
makes the film a field of hope. Thessaloniki is turned from an objective landscape
that exists ‘out there’ to the free, indirect discourse of Alexandros. The visit to his
daughter’s apartment becomes his way back to his family’s old summer-house by the
sea. As his daughter opens the letter Alexandros has just found, the voice of his dead
wife is heard in the room. The dim grey light of the apartment gives way to the sunlit
air of the summer-house, where the young couple waits for family friends to pay a

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visit to their daughter who has just been born. Language is what brings the past to
life in the present. It seems almost natural that Alexandros should find himself hand-
in-hand with his dead wife.

In a manner already familiar from Ulysses’ Gaze, and also reminiscent of Bergman
in Wild Strawberries, Alexandros is not transposed as a young man into this past
event. He remains in his present form, well over fifty years old and still wearing the
same coat. Angelopoulos does not recreate memories from the past, in a way that
would be designated as a flashback. Rather, he brings the past to life in the present,
so as to highlight the tension between them.

This sequence is not an event that blots out everything that came after it. “It
establishes a continuing dialogue with loss and its remains.” 6 All the guests are
dressed in white. Can this be an allusion to the white suits that the ruling bourgeoisie
wear in Days of ’36 to signify their blankness? Or is it the soothing white of a dream
superimposed by the workings of memory? The question remains unanswered. The
guests enter the house as a group and then scatter into different rooms. The camera
records their entrance from within the hallway, as if the camera had been waiting for
them to appear. After the group dissolves, the camera starts a semicircular inquiring
movement, as if trying to decide which action to follow, which subject to choose.

Two of the guests move to the sitting room, where they are about to engage in a
political conversation. It is less than a year before the establishment of the military
dictatorship in Greece in 1967. The camera records them from a distance, from
almost behind the door of the opposite room – like the gaze of a wanderer who
happens to eavesdrop on a conversation. It will not remain long in this position. The
discourse concerning the political upheavals of modern Greece, already dealt with in
the 70s films, is unable to hold the desire of the gaze. That belongs to the present and
the object of its quest lies elsewhere. The camera will move to the right, in order to
bring back into the frame the porch by the sea where the newborn baby is waiting.

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Memory becomes a moment of creation, where the subject who thinks or remembers
takes refuge in the past in order to deal with the decay of the body. In this last film in
Angelopoulos’ Trilogy of Borders, the time for historical specifics seems to have
elapsed. The emphasis on personal remembrance leaves little space for politics.
During the second memory sequence in the family house, one of the guests asks
Alexandros: “So what is the Left saying these days?” Alexandros, his mind set on
the porch where his newborn baby is lying, responds with a tiny gesture (as if to
acknowledge the question) and then asks, quickly but ironically, “About what?”

The Brechtian Gest and the focus on historical events seem totally absent. However,
as in Ulysses’ Gaze, there are striking images where politics resurface and disrupt the
narrative continuum. In the previous film, it occurs at the family reunion in Costanza,
where the grotesque dance of the Stalinist officers signifies the tragicomic character
of totalitarianism. The arrest of A.’s uncle comes about in an almost surreal fashion.
The two male officers arrest the uncle while dancing together, and walk away as a
rhythmical trio.

In Eternity and a Day, this moment occurs close to the final sequence, where
Alexander and the young immigrant are travelling by bus. It is night and this is their
last journey together. The next day, the boy will board a ship to Italy and Alexander
will be admitted to hospital for his final treatment. The whole sequence is rich in
symbolism, already visible from the bus stop, which is named All Souls (Asomaton).
The actual name of this bus stop in real life, All Souls signifies the passing over into
another dimension. From this moment, the sequence takes on a deep dreamlike
quality.

A young protestor enters the bus at the second stop, holding a red flag, and almost
immediately falls asleep. It has already been pointed out how this signifies the Left
being in a state of sleep. 7 Yet this remains one of the most striking images in the
film. Shot in frontal perspective, the image presents Alexandros, the boy and the
Leftist youth as he sleeps in the background. The first two are watching a
performance by three musicians who have just got off the bus. The shot is taken from

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the side of the musicians, yet its low angle suggests that it is not a reaction shot
signifying their gaze. It is an impersonal shot, yet it is far from objective. The
dreamlike nature of the sequence rules out objectivity. Once again, we have an
autonomous sequence free of the restrictions of the evolving plot. It is not an
objective image of the real waiting to be recorded. It is a moment of creation that
comments on a social reality. It carries the gaze of Alexandros, while being
impersonal at the same time.

“Time is like a child playing marbles by the sea.” This is one of the first lines heard
on the soundtrack of the film. To whom does this voice belong? There is no clear
cause and effect between a speaker and this voice. It could be the voice of
Alexandros as a child or the voice of one of his friends. It is definitely not the voice
of an omniscient narrator, or the voice of God. The result is an ambiguous image,
where the act of enunciation eludes any attempt at direct attribution – and the where
the subject ceases to be the master of events. Time flows and Alexandros is
constitutive of a memory time, where the past is brought to life in the present, but he
is also subject to the passing of time irrespective of his presence.

The past returns both as liberator and as anxiety. The first memory of Alexandros as
a child, sneaking out onto the seashore belongs to him as much as to the impersonal
flow of time. There are no direct links, with Alexandros being the agent of this
daydreaming. The tracking camera follows and leads the child outside the house.
Still, it does not merely serve as a functional tool describing the movement of a
human agent from one space to the next. It constitutes an autonomous movement,
where the space around the boy becomes the foreground.

Furthermore, this shot does not deliver a movement executed from the script.
Choosing to film on location, the director has to establish a dialogue with the pro-
filmic space. Unlike filming inside a studio, where space can be accommodated to
serve the requirements of a preconceived idea, shooting on location requires major
decisions to be taken according to the dictates of the pre-existing space. The latter
becomes transformed for the requirements of the film but still retains a prior

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existence, a history that escapes the requirements of the plot. It is this space that
becomes autonomous, rather than functioning simply as an object of the character’s
gaze.

This should not lead, however, to the opposite conclusion – whereby the movement
of the child is only a pretext for a tracking shot whose function is purely decorative.
The two movements are linked in an organic but autonomous symmetry. The
tracking shot is the gaze of Alexandros scrutinising his own body as a child, the
interior of the summer-house, the dim light that belongs to the realm of the dream
along with the movement towards the shore, a movement that carries with it the
sound of waves that set the dying intellectual free from his anxiety. It is a space that
belongs to the diegesis as the personal past of the main character.

At the same time, the shot automatically delivers an impersonal intensity that can be
traced in the cinema as far back as Murnau. Such intensity recurs, and materialises in
different forms, through Welles and Mizogushi to Godard and Wenders. It is the
desire for the medium to acquire mobility. We should not speak of any kind of
mobility, though, but only that which is materialised through the use of the tracking
shot. In Eternity and a Day we do not see a self-reflexive reference to a cinematic
past as we do in Ulysses’ Gaze, where the interposition of the Manaki foot reels paid
tribute to the early steps of cinema. Rather, the memory of the Angelopoulian hero
brings forth a tracking shot whose history is embedded in its form and is
automatically evoked and brought to the surface along with the signature of its
author. The Angelopoulian tracking shot marks a continuum and a difference in the
desire for movement.

Eternity and a Day returns, in a way, to an image that was established in Landscape
in the Mist – where the world as seen through the eyes of two children gave rise to a
filmic landscape of a fairytale nature. In that film, the frozen policemen covered in
outlandish snowflakes (falling as if in slow motion) and the factory seen as a
threatening dragon are images that belong to the realm of fantasy. Far from being an
escapist projection, however, the gaze of the two children came to signify faith and

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hope. It was their innocence that allowed the encounter with the Tree of Hope to take
place at the end of the film, thus materialising the tree that Orestes had imagined
being inside the empty piece of celluloid they had found in the streets. The film also
brought forward images from all the previous films of Angelopoulos to that date (the
return of the troupe from The Travelling Players, the woman from Reconstruction,
the horse of Megalexandros) and blended them with the story of the two children to
create a magnificent intertextual universe.

In Eternity and a Day, the presence of the boy immigrant turns the old man into a
storyteller who evokes the spectre of the poet Solomos. History becomes a tale, told
by Alexandros to the young boy by the side of a lake, and it is of a time “when the
Greeks where under the rule of the Turks” as the first line of the tale goes. The
absence of past historical specifics brings forth the now time of a Cinema of Wonder,
to use a term from John Orr, who attributes the term to a number of East European
auteurs whose common denominator is a particular liturgical style in the use of long
takes. Starting with the Georgian director Sergei Paradjanov and moving on to
Andrei Tarkovsky and Angelopoulos (the only non-Eastern European), Orr inquires
into the specifics of each director’s work. 8 Orr sees the cinema of wonder as bringing
forth a point of view that transcends everyday experience in a grand vision concerned
with history, politics and social reality. Its narratives become frescoes of the cultures
they are part of:

[The cinema of wonder] …preserves the quest for totality, which it inherits
from socialist culture, but shifts it quite radically away from the world of
ideology…. It is materially grounded in a vivid life world, in the realm of
the material image, yet seeks transcendental meaning beyond official
frameworks of materialism. Its narratives create parallel worlds to the
official discourse of politics…without resorting to the supernatural or the
purely symbolic. 9

The ‘wonder’ element in Angelopoulos is mostly related to the use of what is out of
field and the way it is introduced into the shot. Having withdrawn from depicting an

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action, the camera tracks slowly to cover a space in which little if anything seems to
be taking place and culminates in the final revelation of an object of astonishment.
This is clearly visible in Eternity and a Day, not only during the first encounter with
Solomos but also in the previous sequence when Alexandros and the boy are moving
towards the border with Albania.

A static shot, taken from an above diagonal, introduces the car with the two travellers
as they make a stop at a rural road going up a mountain. The car stops right before
the road makes a turn to the left. The diagonal perspective from above reduces the
line of the horizon to the upper right corner of the frame, thus providing a sense of
closure. The left side of the frame is occupied by the sides of a hill, which reaches
down to the edge of the road. As they get out of the car, the boy – who has kept silent
almost up until that moment – starts recounting his experience of crossing the border
into Greece. The stillness of the camera, and the absence of physical movement in
the mise-en-scene, holds the narrative to the present moment of the shot. The focus
lies in the recounting of the story.

Nothing prepares us for what follows. When the boy stops talking, the camera (set on
a crane) starts moving to the left. As it leaves the two characters behind, it passes
above the height of the cliff and turns into an establishing shot of the border taken
from a high diagonal perspective. The shot reveals a gigantic barbed wire fence in
the mist, with a gate in the middle and silhouettes hanging from it, extending beyond
the two ends of the frame. It is a shot of monumental composition. The black
silhouettes in the mist seem to be suspended in thin air, aimlessly trying to get to the
other side of the borders, to the side that we as spectators occupy while staring at the
other.

It is a spectacle for which the spectator is totally unprepared, one that generates an
overwhelming sense of amazement. This feeling is intensified by the slow pace of
the crane shot, accompanied by an eerie elliptical soundtrack as if preparing for the
moment of revelation. The soundtrack aims at arousing the expectation of the
audience. One feels that an action or an event is about to take place, but is still left

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unprepared for an image that transcends realism at such a degree. It is certainly an
image that appears in terms of a revelation. The gigantic wire fence covers the frame
from one end to the other and extends over its borders is as if stretching to infinity.
After a moment where the camera is left framing the gigantic spectacle, the boy
enters the frame from below. Slowly, the gates open and a black silhouette in high-
ranking military uniform walks just as slowly towards him, stretching out his hand as
if calling the boy back into the abyss. Before the officer has a chance to get his hands
on the boy, Alexandros enters the frame and pulls the boy away. The sequence ends
with the menacing black figure watching the two as they run out of frame. Behind
him the black silhouettes remain suspended on the barbed wire like frozen statues.

One could argue, in fact, that what we see is an attempt to aestheticise pain and
terror. Such a critique would be valid for a classical realist text. Angelopoulos,
however, transgresses and transcends realism. He creates a filmic event that uses the
pro-filmic world as a point of departure, not as a subject for representation. The
director departs towards the element of wonder, yet the wonder element is not that of
a grandiose Expressionism that generates titanic clashes of emotions through sublime
imagery. It would be almost impossible to describe this image as ecstatic or even
terrible. The hanging silhouettes appear almost like two-dimensional figures
suspended in thin air seen from afar. The wire in the mist is of extraordinary
proportions, yet it is a minimal geometric construction of straight lines that seem to
extend horizontally ad infinitum and lacks depth.

Yet again, Angelopoulos denotes a diagonal perspective where the sense of

perspective is somehow reduced and the image appears flat. The absence of depth
makes it difficult for an audience to lose itself in the image. The grey undertones
evoke humility rather than terror; the lack of substance stops the composition from
becoming a piece of baroque Expressionism, which could engage the viewer’s gaze
in a pleasurable sense. The image is composed as if Angelopoulos were sculpting it
out of thin air, and the result is that of a shadow play. Yet it remains an astonishing
image. Angelopoulos, it seems, is constantly trying to formulate the feeling of awe
even in its most bleak materialisations. Although the use of non-diegetic music may

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appeal to the senses, it is impossible to define this moment as a move towards
Wagnerianism. 10 The sequence culminates in a moment of revelation, yet the
elliptical score does not lead to a climax. The camera in turn lingers from a distance,
suspended between a desire to encompass the whole and the need to maintain a
stoical distance.

It is the same principle that materialises during the first encounter with the poet
Solomos. After Alexandros and the boy pose by a lake close to the Albanian border,
the camera (directed by the gaze of Alexandros) continues with a tracking movement
to the right, bringing the out-of-field into the frame. Solomos appears dressed in 19th
century clothing. He recites a poem from the time he decided to leave for Greece to
join the revolutionaries against the Ottomans. Karaindrou’s non-diegetic music
delivers a revolutionary-style anthem and the poet steps into a carriage. The camera
records it as it moves straight into the depth of field.

Unlike the previous shot, this sequence does not present a direct encounter between
the characters and the image of astonishment. While the haunting borderline appears
as a nightmare image where the characters re-enter the frame and collide with a
menacing presence, it is now the movement of the camera that leaves the main
characters at the sides in order to deliver a fleeting image that appears and disappears
like a mirage. The poet appears as a moment of rupture in the evolution of the plot,
and for a few seconds the director evokes the passion of revolution through the non-
diegetic use of music. For as long as this shot endures, the characters of the drama
are reduced to oblivion. This is a shot that the director evokes from the past; it is a
direct encounter with history, not a flashback. The poet returns by the lake in the
north of Greece and the dynamics of a movement from the early 19th century collide
with the present.

However, this collision is not brought about through the use of montage where two
shots are juxtaposed in direct contrast. Neither does it take place within the confines
of a long take as in The Travelling Players. The dialectic now works a posteriori and
it is evoked at a later point in the narrative through the image of the Leftist youth

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sleeping on the bus with the red flag at his side. Meanwhile, the carriage makes its
way towards the depth of field and the pervading melancholia strikes another blow
for this is a fleeting image. The past force rises, yet this is not the rise of a phoenix.
Nor is it a moment where reality is annihilated. The presence of the carriage has a
dual significance. It is simultaneously an image of heightened passions (the poet is
off to join a revolution) and an image of melancholia (this moment is in the process
of being lost, just as we viewers lose sight of the carriage as it vanishes into the depth
of field). What remains is a moment of passing over from Alexandros to the young
boy, via a moment of recognition.

The poet was buying words, for he did not know enough Greek to speak the song of
the revolution. Similarly the young boy becomes, in symbolic terms, a new collector
of words. As Vassiliki Kolokotroni points out, the return of the spectre of Solomos is
not a demand for a new revolution in social terms. 11 Solomos embodies the need to
speak one’s own language in a world that is becoming homogeneous in response to
global market forces. As Alexandros exclaims at his mother’s death-bed: “Why is it
that I felt at home only when I could speak my own language?” As Angelopoulos
himself remarks, quoting Martin Heidegger, the first thing one remembers after one’s
birth is one’s mother’s voice. 12

The words that the boy offers to Alexandros are not those he heard at the port in
Thessaloniki; they are part of his milieu in North Epirus. In a familiar fashion,
Angelopoulos is trying to preserve images as they pass on in time. These include
dialects and words that are in danger of becoming obsolete, along with community
rituals like the Pontian wedding in the port of Thessaloniki and the half-derelict Neo-
Classical buildings but also, first and foremost, the landscape of Florina, the usual
setting for Angelopoulos’ films.

While these may be images of nostalgia, they are not exempt from criticism. The
camera records the wedding ritual, yet the couple could easily turn out like
Alexandros’ daughter and her husband, who have lost all sense of their roots and are
selling the family house. Their action echoes the attitudes of the Greek middle class

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since the 1950s, when the state gave every private owner a licence to exchange
his/her residential property for a limited number of flats in newly built blocks. The
result was the mass demolition of two-storey houses in urban centres, and their
replacement with large blocks of flats built under contract by private companies.
Once a further state act removed the height limit for the new blocks, the final result
was the destruction of any sense of community, followed by waves of criminal
violations of urban planning.
Angelopoulos records the communal rituals free of any nationalist connotations. The
wedding does not advocate the supremacy of Greek tradition. Rather, it conveys a
sense of loss, in that these rituals are attributed to an immigrant community. It is not
a naïve propagation of an organic relationship with the land, but a further
signification of the ruptures of history and the breakdown of a continuity based on a
belief in progress – a familiar motif that has recurred in Angelopoulos’ work since
The Travelling Players, where the troupe was unable to finish its performance due to
the interventions of history. Almost clumsily, Alexandros stops the wedding
ceremony to hand his dog over to his housemaid whose son is getting married. The
unnatural gesture becomes more intense by the freezing of the attendants. Yet this
ritual will continue.

The image of Eternity and a Day is one of melancholia, yet not of despair. It creates
a filmic landscape where the past constantly returns and in many ways illuminates
the present. We could argue that an action-based narrative, where the characters
move towards the fulfilment of tasks in order to break away from the past, is one
based (however freely) on Freud’s notion of liberation through mourning. When Mel
Gibson plays William Wallace in Braveheart (1995) there is a direct cause and effect
between a tragic event and his decision to take action. The enemy stands before him
and the possibility of direct action is feasible. The action moves towards the
fulfilment of a goal that will automatically erase the past.

It seems almost impossible to think of the massacre at the beginning of Braveheart. It

has fulfilled its purpose, which is to set the plot in motion. We could then claim that
such a narrative works in terms of a therapeutic session, where a trauma is healed

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though a resorting to redemptive action. The object of mourning, gradually if not
immediately, disappears. In the cinema of Angelopoulos, in contrast, the object of
melancholia breaks open so that the viewer witnesses its many facets. The narrative,
although linear, breaks up its motor links opening up to significations of time and to
images that recur not only from the same film but also from earlier ones.
Melancholia denotes the feeling of loss together with the persistence of the past,
whose rendering oscillates between one of critical reconstruction and affective
animation.

Eternity and a Day is the personal story of Alexandros. Yet it is also the story of the
young immigrant who, as Vassiliki Kolokotroni points out, is a recurrent image of
hope in the films of Angelopoulos and of what I see as a signification of the new
nomads. 13 The search for a home becomes an existential journey and the director
seems suspended between a nostalgic lament for the familiar, which is passing, and
an astonished desire for the new. During the night ride on the bus, we see cyclists
pass by in yellow raincoats – a sight already familiar from Landscape in the Mist and
The Suspended Step of the Stork. Unable to sustain their function in the narrative,
they seem to embody the impossibility of embracing life with a total theory. Their
elusive presence, far from rendering the sublime astonishment and terror of a
Romantic poet, turns them into signifiers of hope – familiar yet alien at the same
time. Their cheap, mass-produced plastic overcoats, added to the minor scale they
occupy in the frame, prevent them from evoking any sense of heroism or grandeur.
Their presence, on the contrary, is one of humility. It is the same humility
Angelopoulos demonstrates towards the immigrant issue.

Lasse Tomassen points out, through his reading based on Ernesto Laclau’s notion of
hegemony and the heterogeneous, that in Angelopoulos’ Trilogy of Borders:

…refugees occupy the place of the heterogeneous, of those persons

which are neither simply excluded nor simply included, but who
cannot find their place in a Europe divided into national communities
by political borders. 14

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Citing Laclau, Tomassen refers to heterogeneity as that which is suppressed in order to
make clear the homogenous identity of the community. The heterogeneous is not merely
what is excluded. Every sense of community is constituted on exclusion. The
heterogeneous goes beyond the dialectic of inside/outside, us and them. It fails to be
grasped within traditional dialectical notions. It resists ontological identification. It
becomes elusive, always an excess upon which the community is built. The
heterogeneous is what fails to be represented.

The heterogeneous becomes visible if one thinks how the representation of a community
takes place in terms of government. Each community consists of differential elements,
groups and individuals. Each representative body of a community aims at articulating the
common grounds that transcend the differences of those involved. Simultaneously, it
tries to suppress the fact that the representative body itself is another differential element
among others inside the community. Each representative establishes his/her authority on
empty signifiers that appeal to the community as a whole. The idea of freedom is one of
the most common. Yet there is always an element inside the community, usually a group
that feels it is not being represented and thus challenges the notion that the rights of a
community are accessible to all its members. What becomes apparent is that there is
always a possibility for a different representative to take the place of the former.
According to Tomassen, what becomes clear is that the concrete representation of a
community is the result of contingent hegemonic articulation. It is the result of social
struggle, which is in turn historical and thus subsequent to change. The stable and clear
identity of the community becomes challenged.

Immigrants belong to the sphere of the heterogeneous. They are neither inside nor
outside the geographical borders of a national community. They do not pose an outside
threat to the community yet they challenge the notion of its essence, which is based on
ethnic purity. During the first encounter between Alexandros and the boy what we
actually see is the police chasing the illegal immigrant children at the traffic lights of a
main street in Thessaloniki. Faced with this operation, Alexandros saves the boy but
Angelopoulos also makes visible what the community tries to suppress: the issue of mass
immigration. The boy is a symbol of hope, but he also embodies the subjects of mass
illegal migration, of those who are not represented by any international law or local

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community institution. The only refuge is that of asylums where the immigrants are
jammed together and reduced to a passive state, as we saw in The Suspended Step of the
Stork.

What becomes important – and here I am following Assimina Karavadas’ thoughts on

her critique of Antonio Negri’s Multitude – is that the film makes visible not the
multitude of active social subjects who become unionised (in local, specific and
autonomous ways) as a counterweight to the power of a global capitalist empire, but
those who fail to become organised and remain passive. 15 The boy in the film falls prey
to the Albanian mafia. It is merely chance that brings Alexandros to his rescue.
However, this individual act is not and cannot be elevated into a symbolic act on behalf
of the national community to which he belongs. Furthermore, as Tomassen points out,
Alexandros has to resort to the existing symbolic structures of the capitalist world. 16 He
buys the boy off the mafiosi. Alexandros remains bound to the existing social structures
and his power remains more than limited. Yet in this limiting structure, the film offers a
space of opening towards the other.

One could say that both Alexandros and the boy are equated under the banner of ksenitis.
When the boy returns to the aching Alexandros at the port of Thessaloniki, after
having bought a few new words from the passers-by, he also gives him the word
ksenitis (ξενίτης) meaning “stranger”, a word that he knew already from his home.
The word ksenitis is an obsolete word related to the Greek minority of Northern
Epirus in Albania. The two characters, Alexandros and the boy, meet on a threshold
and they both feel what Angelopoulos sees as the same angst, the angst of a stranger.
Without losing sight of the incommensurable gap between the young immigrant and
the dying intellectual in terms of culture and material well-being, Angelopoulos
wonders if there is a common thread between them based on the pain they both feel.

Ksenitis is a word that denotes the existential anxiety of being always a stranger to
oneself and to the world in a way that is similar to Albert Camus’ notion of The
Stranger. However, what we see in his book The Stranger is the clash between one man
and the moralistic ethics of his contemporary French Algerians. The book portrays the
hypocrisy of the colonial French against the protagonist, who is executed not because he

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killed an Arab but because his subjectivity, his refusal to follow the norms of common
sense made him a threat to their identity. The Arab who gets killed, meanwhile, remains
invisible as does the whole community of non-French Algerians. The Arab does not
return as a haunting presence. He remains an object who meets an absurd death. Not for
a single moment does his presence return to the memory of the main character, whose
rebellion against his society from within the confines of his cell while sentenced to death
remains reclusively closed to the other.

In Eternity and a Day the world is presented through the point of view of Alexandros,
which in turn mingles with the subjectivity of the camera – yet the other is not presented
as a mere object. We should remember the sequence on the Greek-Albanian border,
where the nightmarish barbed wire that seems to extend to infinity is also (and mainly)
seen by the boy. Furthermore, it is the effect that the boy has on the old man that finally
triggers the return of the spectre of Solomos. One could argue (and could in fact be right)
that what we see in the film is not the Pasolinian ‘free indirect discourse’ we have
thoroughly discussed in relation to Voyage to Cythera, where the point of view of the
director mingles with that of the other who comes from a different social, economic and
even historical background.

One could argue that the Angelopoulian hero is a mere stand-in for the director, a self-
reflexive figure. On the other hand, we have argued against comparing Voyage to
Cythera with 8½, claiming that Angelopoulos places a distance between himself and his
protagonist. The camera, through an impersonal point of view, escapes and transgresses
the character’s subjectivity. Angelopoulos does not substitute his own vision for the
point of view of the other; we never really see the world through the subjective
viewpoint of the immigrants. What we do see – and this is probably more important – is
the ethical stance of caring for the other. It is a form of caring that, as Blanchot puts it,
does not reduce itself to consolation and remedy. It is not the caring of a philanthropic
charity, based on an abstract universal humanism. It is the sort of caring that entails risk,
the risk that Alexandros takes three times in order to save the boy. It is also one that
entails responsibility. As Blanchot puts it:

responsibility for the Other presupposes an overturning such that it can

only be marked by a change in the status of “me”…which withdraws

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 me from my order--perhaps from all orders and from order itself--
responsibility, which separates me from myself (from the ‘me’ that is
mastery and power, from the free, speaking subject) and reveals the
other in place of me, requires that I answer for absence, for passivity.
It requires, that is to say, that I answer for the impossibility of being
responsible--to which it has already consigned me by holding me
accountable and also discounting me altogether. 17

What we see in the film, and in all three films comprising the Trilogy of Borders, are the
stories of three individual wanderers. Yet, on the same plane, we witness the movement
of uprooted immigrants being halted. These are not happy nomads wandering around the
globe, forming a power against any established authority. Their stories are erased by the
vagaries of nature – as when they are placed in rotten boats by the local mafia in order to
cross borders, as we see at the opening of The Suspended Step.

Alexandros, and Angelopoulos by extension, do not give voice to the excluded under a
homogenous universal claim. Angelopoulos’ voice does not simulate the other. The
other, imprisoned in its own passivity, does not need a ‘hero’ in social realist terms – a
hero who, in the long run, is only imagined by a member of the sovereign citizen body as
appealing to his/her sense of ethical consensus. One example is a sequence from The
Suspended Step, where two immigrants are involved in a verbal argument and one
suddenly slashes the veins in his right arm. The camera observes the scene as if it were
struggling, like the viewer, to make out its specific details. We as viewers remain outside
the event. Unless we happen to speak Kurdish, we have no way of understanding the
quarrel. The sequence is deliberately left without subtitles, so that we remain within
Alexandros’ point of view.

In Ulysses’ Gaze, when A. is crossing the Greek-Albanian border, he encounters a

landscape dominated by groups of immigrants who stand in poetic formations and stare
– silently and from a distance – into his car and, by extension, at the viewer. It is this
incommensurable gap – this space between the car (where the camera is placed) and the
triadic formations in the background – which dominates the frame. Angelopoulos is not

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willing to pretend the gap is not there. A journey is not one of safety. The crossing of the
border entails risk, the risk of searching for a home beyond the one that we know.

Like A. in Ulysses’ Gaze, Alexandros in Eternity and a Day acts out of responsibility.
Faced with the systematic erasure of the immigrant issue, Alexandros becomes
accountable for his community. This is not a mere symbolic act to redeem the
community as a whole – as it would be in a social realist film shot in either the U.S. or
the Soviet Union, the two opposing global forces during the Cold War. In both cases,
and always in relation to the historical specifics of each genre, we see a typified hero
who embodies the imaginary social values of the community. What we have in Eternity
and a Day, in contrast, is a singularity of discomfort, the discomfort of the stranger. This
comes from the periphery since Greece is at the periphery of Europe or – in relation to
the immigrant issue – the borders of Fortress Europe.

To the Sea

The director commented that he would want the viewers of the film to feel it with
their skin rather than merely reflect on its subject matter. 18 Perhaps this is a positive
way to describe the presence of the cyclists or the return of the poet, but it certainly
carries with it the sense of an afternoon breeze that is constantly present in the
personal memories of Alexandros. Each encounter with the past is shot in partial
daylight next to the sea. Even a shower of rain has a completely different function
from the moody atmosphere of the previous films. It is not an element that adds to
the contemplative mood of the film and the characters’ psyches, and it is definitely
not the rain that pours as Spyros leaves the country in Voyage to Cythera. In this
film, rain brings a sense of redemption, but this is still a momentary feeling.

Alexandros’ decision not to go to the hospital takes him to the beach in front of the
family house, where he is reunited once more with his wife and friends on the very
same day his daughter was born. Alexandros returns there for the final dance. The
non-diegetic waltz leads the dance closer to the shore, and Alexandros feels joy from
his choice to act against the inevitability of time. Yet the ending of the film finds him

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alone facing the immensity of the sea. The dying intellectual stands face to face with
what he most desires – the innocence of an image – and yet he is alone.

The image of the sea is not a new image, but it is one that signifies the flux of time
unlike any other. It is as if the sea can still stir up the imagination, lending itself with
difficulty to the stereotypical. One could argue that the journeys of the
Angelopoulian hero take him inevitably – one way or another – to the edge of the
sea. Although the action may take place deep in the interior or mountainous north of
Greece, the characters invariably find themselves by the sea, if only for a fleeting
moment. In The Travelling Players, we see the troupe performing for British forces
on a sandy beach and the resistance fighters galloping at the edge of the sea to
liberate Greece from the Nazis. Megalexandros emerges from the depths of Cape
Sounio and, during his procession towards the commune, dispatches a letter to the
governor from what appears to be the same beach as in the earlier film. In Voyage to
Cythera, the old man returns from the sea and disappears back into it at the end,
while in The Beekeeper the three friends pay a momentary nostalgic visit to the
seashore. In Landscape in the Mist, the troupe is seen yet again rehearsing Golfo the
Shepherdess on a sandy beach, and the gigantic iconic hand of Michelangelo’s
Creation (with its index finger missing) emerges from the deep waters of
Thessaloniki’s bay.

The presence of the sea, and of water generally, alternates in Angelopoulos between
signifying time as flux and time as endurance, but also signifies human time as a
wish for redemption. In Angelopoulos, water moves from physics to metaphysics
and provides depth for contemplation and the desire to transcend the present
moment. Such transcendence, though, is always from the perspective of mortal
consciousness. This consciousness will not sketch the apotheosis of nature, as the
plane where the subject can free itself from the restraints of culture and reunite with
it in through some ecstatic experience.

Similarly, it is not the transcendence of a ferocious physical element, portrayed in

large dynamic waves ready to swallow its innocent victims and needing to be tamed

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by a pioneering technological subject. Nature appears indifferent to the action and
the will of humans, whose sense of time and history seem to be limited in its
presence. The sea carries a sense of duration that transcends the history of men and
nations. The characters of Angelopoulos always reach the edge of the sea and the sea
becomes a limit – not a limit to be tamed, but one from which the Angelopoulian
hero reflects upon his life and on the present historical milieu.

We could argue that this is another space between, a space between the present
historical moment and the open – that which knows no boundaries. When
Alexandros visits his mother, he reveals a life full of regret and shattered dreams.
Before his final exodus, Alexandros aches to leave a trace that will remain and take
on new life through the boy. The boy finds in Alexandros a temporary shelter for a
day, just before embarking illegally on a ship to Italy. It is in this space between that
the two characters manage to create a feeling of being at home, and this is what the
director himself seems to long for throughout the film.

A question then arises: How long does this feeling last? The last sequence in the
family house, which is the final long take in the Trilogy of Borders, leads Alexandros
back to the sea. The camera moves beyond the interior of the building, making a
slow vertical track towards the sandy beach. 19 It is there, during the last waltz with
his wife and after he has announced that he will not go to the hospital but will carry
on making plans for the following day as if nothing had happened, when Alexandros
asks: “How long does tomorrow last?” His wife, receding slowly towards the right
of the frame, remarks in a fleeting, spectral voice: “An eternity and a day.” It is as if
her voice has become one with the afternoon breeze. Alexandros remains, his hand
stretched towards the space where she has vanished.

This absence of a categorical answer leaves space for the suspended question to
remain. Alexandros refuses to stop projecting towards the future. Yet again this is not
the apotheosis of spirit over the decaying body. The question is explicit. Alexandros
knows that tomorrow cannot last forever yet he cannot stop desiring it. The surplus
and a day becomes a reminder that one cannot reach a permanent state of fulfillment.

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Angelopoulos marks the desire to be at ease with oneself and with the world, a desire
that always moves ‘beyond’ as a surplus without ever being exhausted. Still it might
also mean that this desire can never be satisfied and that the feeling of being at home
is unattainable. Home then ceases to be an object or a geographical plane, giving its
place to a ceaseless journey driven by desire: and the permanence of eternity gives
way to an image of time as flux, time as an image moving beyond closure.

The last shot in the Trilogy of Borders is an image of time in which past, present and
future bifurcate each other in a single long take. The shot, opening on the veranda,
starts with the baby in the cradle. The narrative may point towards the past, yet the
presence of the newborn baby points directly towards the future. Alexandros moves
in between, in a present that points simultaneously towards past and future – where
the slow tracking movement of the camera unites time with space and allows the
passing of time to be felt.

In the cinema of Angelopoulos, we do not see the return of a monumental time, a

Golden Age that has marked the histories of men. It is only time itself that is
monumental, an ever-changing flow like that of the sea. The final tracking shot
closes in on the sweaty back of Alexandros’ head. Right before the final cut, we
listen to his mother’s voice calling him from afar. Her voice seems to come from
some atemporal space beyond the frame. In the face of his own death, Alexandros
stares at the immensity of the sea. Redemption makes her final all-embracing return,
calling him out of the present and into the beyond.

1
See Sigmund Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ in the Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol.14, ed. James Strachey, Hogarth Press, London, 1957, p.
243.
We should note after David L. Eng and David Kazanjian (see endnote 2) that Freud himself in his
subsequent essay The Ego and the Id questions the disparate nature of the two states as well as the
possibility of absolute redemption through mourning. Still the emphasis on the pathological nature of
melancholia remains.
2
See David L. Eng and David Kazanjian, ‘Mourning Remains’ in Loss: The Politics of Mourning, ed.
David L. Eng and David Kazanjian, University of California Press, London Berkley California 2003.
pp. 1-5.

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3
David L. Eng and David Kazanjian, ibid, p. 1.
4
See Michel Ciment, ‘Η Μελαγχολία στο τέλος του Αιώνα’ in Βλέμματα στο κόσμο του Θόδωρου
Αγγελόπουλου, Εκδόσεις Φεστιβάλ Κινηματογράφου Θεσσαλονίκης, 2001, p. 71-75. See also Βασίλης
Ραφαηλίδης in ‘Το Παρθένο Βλέμμα in Το Βλέμμα του Ποιητή’, Αθήνα, Αιγόκερως, 1996, pp. 43-51.
5
Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ in Illuminations, London: Fontana Press,
1992, p. 247.
6
Quoted from David L. Eng and David Kazanjian, ibid, p. 1.
7
See Paola Minucci, ‘Η Μόνη Πιθανή Επανάσταση’, in Θόδωρος Αγγελόπουλος, ed. Ειρήνη Στάθη,
Φεστιβάλ Κινηματογράφου Θεσσαλονίκης Εκδόσεις Καστανιώτη, Αθήνα 2000, p. 320.
8
John Orr, The Art and Politics of Film, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2000, pp.50 -63.
9
John Orr, The Art and Politics of Film, ibid, p. 52.
10
The term Wagnerianism, that has taken its name from 19th century composer Richard Wagner, is
used to refer to the fusion of different works of art in a grand operatic spectacle: what Wagner himself
called a ‘total work of art’. Music, setting, performance, delivery of speech and song come together in
perfect harmony in order to serve the essential vision of the work. Wagnerianism denotes a
monumental vision that propagates mysticism and eternal essences. See Austin Harrington, Art and
social theory: Sociological Arguments in Aesthetics, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2004, pp. 133-135.
11
Vassiliki Kolokotroni, ‘Monuments of Time: The Works of Theo Angelopoulos’ in Post-War
Cinema and Modernity: a Film Reader, ed. John Orr and Olga Taxidou, Edinburgh University Press,
Edinburgh, 2000, p. 104.
12
Interview with the author, unpublished, June 2005.
13
Vassiliki Kolokotroni, ‘Monuments of Time’ in Post-War Cinema and Modernity: a Film Reader,
ibid., p. 104.
14
Lasse Tomassen, Heterogeneity, Representation and Justice: Borders and Communities in
Angelopoulos’ Balkan Trilogy,
[Link] p.2.
15
Assimina Karavanta, ‘The Global, the Local and the Spectral: Contemplating Spectral Politics’ in
Global Babel: Questions of Discourse and Communication in a Time of Globalization, Eds. Samir
Dayal & Margueritte Murphy, Cambridge Scholars Press, London, 2008, pp. 163- 188.
16
Lasse Tomassen, ibid, p.5.
17
Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln Nebraska
1995, p.25.
18
Theo Angelopoulos in Paola Minucci, ‘Η Μόνη Πιθανή Επανάσταση’ in Θόδωρος Αγγελόπουλος,
ed. Ειρήνη Στάθη,Φεστιβάλ Κινηματογράφου Θεσσαλονίκης, ibid., p. 319.
19
What actually happens is that the crew of Angelopoulos built a simulation of the far end interior of
the house facing the sea that would slice open as the camera proceeded in a forward tracking
movement. The camera was mounted on a dolly crane. The simulation consisted of three layers. The
one stood for the interior walls, the second simulated the floor of the last room together with the back
wall and the exit and the third stood for the veranda. The layers of the house were also placed on
tracks that ran vertical to the tracks of the dolly that were in turn pointed towards the sea. In the film
the camera adopts an absolute point of view standing for Alexandros’ vision. As the crane moves
forward and the frame closes in on the exit for the veranda, each layer is slowly removed to allow the
movement of the dolly to continue. When the camera is finally outside the house the crane reaches
down on ground level and proceeds on top of the path with the wooden cords. Two men from the crew
removed each cord that was no longer inside the frame so that the camera could keep moving forward
until it reached a standstill.

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298
 Conclusion: A History of Ruination

This thesis has traced the development of Angelopoulos’ singular aesthetic through a
time span of three decades. I have placed Angelopoulos in a social and historical
context while alluding to previous and contemporary cinematic works from world
cinema, works that have left their imprint on Angelopoulos’ work, thus constituting a
map of exchange between ideas and images – reworked, remodelled or expanded in a
continuous process. Another of my main objectives has been to demonstrate the
political value of Angelopoulos’ films, a value that can only be addressed if one
treats the films through the poetics of the image rather than focusing exclusively on
their narrative content.

Angelopoulos emerged as a filmmaker at the end of the sixties. This was a period of
intense political struggle in Europe as a whole (shaken as it was by the events of May
’68 and the Prague Spring) and particularly so in Greece, as the country fell under
the control of a military junta known as the ‘junta of the Colonels’. A preoccupation
with politics is predominant throughout the first period of the director’s work,
running up until the end of the 1970s and finishing with Megalexandros (1980).

Unlike previous theorists and critics, I have placed this film at a pivotal place in the
Angelopoulos’ work. This runs counter to the standard view, where The Travelling
Players (1975) is considered to be the quintessential film that lies at the heart of his
oeuvre. My own view, in contrast, sees his work in a ‘triangular’ structure – with
Megalexandros at its apex and two other key films, The Travelling Players and The
Suspended Step of the Stork (1991), at either side.

For me, this ‘triangle’ is made up of equidistant spaces – by which, reversing any
angle, one may find a new vantage from which to view the other two. Each view will
necessarily have a different focus and reveal different aspects of a given work. It is a
view that disengages the viewer from a linear perspective on time and history. Rather
that seeing The Travelling Players as a work that informs all the rest, I see the entire

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corpus of the work and its ideas and aesthetic implications as they reappear and are
reworked from film to film. This creates a palimpsest of time, a continuing present
that carries with it traces of the past – a past that is not ‘lost’ but reworked and
returned to, a past that exists in the present as an image of memory. It is this view
that sustains what I will call ‘a history of ruination’.

Memory becomes the driving force that propels an image towards the future. We
have seen how the tracking shot in The Travelling Players delivers a viewpoint based
on ‘impersonal subjectivity’. The presence of the camera, which is felt throughout
the movement, I compared to the movement of Benjamin’s Angelus Novus. Driven
towards the future with his eyes fixed towards the past, the angel keeps piling up
wreckage after wreckage. Similarly, the point of view in all three films that make up
the Trilogy of History, and in its coda Megalexandros, is one that has its eyes fixed
on ruin. Angelopoulos presents a palimpsest of memory, recreating the events that
shaped the entity that is Modern Greece. If there is a unique event whose traces are
deeper and more keenly felt than others, it is the Civil War – which, during the
seventies, survived still in popular memory as an open wound. Angelopoulos maps a
popular movement towards socialism: a movement that had many facets and, as we
eventually see in Megalexandros, was led towards its own ruin by a Stalinist faction.

The most characteristic aesthetic feature in the Trilogy of History, the sequence shot,
becomes a ‘vessel of memory’ that directs the camera’s gaze in a journey through
time, whereby distinct historical periods are united/contrasted within the confines of
a single space. In the opening sequence of The Travelling Players, for example, we
see the troupe as it walks down an alley at the streets of Aigio in 1952 only to reach
the central square back in 1939. Space becomes a generator of memory, and the
camera records the movement of the troupe that brings the past into the present.

With The Travelling Players, Angelopoulos presents a time span of thirteen years as
an image of a vast cycle of history. The film starts with a dictatorship in 1939 and
returns to a state of dictatorship in 1952, following the defeat of the democratic army
during the Civil War. The film ends with a static shot of the troupe in its original

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line-up from 1939. This closing of the circle has a double resonance: one of duration
and one of stasis. The movement halts, bringing forth a stillness like death, one that
can be traced in the use of the static frame within the sequence shot. The emphasis on
mise en scène rather than cutting – through the use of a slow pan or tracking shot,
which gradually shifts into a static shot only to acquire movement again once an
action has been completed – only serves to underline this dialectic between
movement and stasis. Movement carries duration; it unites different chronological
events as they occur in a single meta-historical space. 1 The sequence shot also brings
forth a material world in full view through its emphasis on natural elements, old
architectural planes and gigantic factories – derelict cement buildings in contrast to
derelict stone houses.

At the same time, the long duration of the static shot and the elliptical arrangement of
the mise en scène bring the cinematographic image closer to the qualities of the still
frame. It is this stillness, often expressed through the stillness of the actors
themselves, which carries with it an image of death. It is at this point, when the static
frame encompasses the stillness of the actors, that the cinematographic image moves
towards the photographic. If we accept Roland Barthes’ dictum that the time of the
photographic image is fixed in the past, even as it appears to the eyes of a viewer in
the present, then this fixity automatically becomes a reminder of death. 2 This time
has passed and shall be no more. Likewise, I too – I who am holding this picture –
will also pass. The cinematographic image animates the past into the present through
movement. Yet at the same time, it is through stillness that the event remains distant,
locked in an irretrievable past, as the image points towards death and mortality. This
double movement, I have claimed, generates an image of melancholia, one that is
embedded in the form of the films. 3

The other salient characteristic of the 70s films is that the human subject lacks a
psychological status. Angelopoulos’ characters are seen from a social and historical
perspective. Being gives way to doing and the human agent is seen through his/her
actions. In this way, they echo the Brechtian aesthetic of the Gest, by which the
movement of the actor is defined as critical of the character he/she embodies and also

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reflective of the social relations that surround him/her. (This in marked contrast to
the traditional dramatic focus on psychology and individual character traits.) In
effect, the character is seen as a product of his time and of the social relations he/she
is subjected to, rather than as a carrier of a unique personality feeding off an eternal
human essence. 4

The camera, on the other hand, does not follow the characters’ movement. It
maintains an autonomous function relative to the action as it unfolds, observing from
a distance as the characters walk in and out of frame. Angelopoulos incorporates a
type of ‘inner montage’, where the edit is transferred within the frame and the action
is seen in its full process. This echoes André Bazin’s dictum of placing emphasis on
the mise en scène through the use of long takes, in contrast to an excessive
fragmentation of the profilmic space through montage. It is the use of montage that
the French critic saw as generative of a manipulative avant-garde gaze. 5

Throughout Angelopoulos’ work, space becomes predominant and the image

inscribes the passing of time beyond the characters’ own perception. Time thus
becomes autonomous and ceases to reflect the diegetic gaze of any one character.
Space is treated as a space between two or more actions, an intermediate state where
the figures in the frame acquire an almost spectral presence, as in a canvas that
incorporates a broad field of vision. The frequent use of a telephoto lens somehow
annuls, but also maintains, this illusion of depth and objects appear as if on the same
visual plane.

The human agent also loses his predominance, becoming rather an element in the
composition of the frame. Through this visual technique, Angelopoulos moves
beyond the painterly into the realm of the metaphorical. Each human figure is not
simply a visual element, but also a being subject to a given state of social and
historical relations.

With the advent of the 80s, Angelopoulos closes his tetralogy of History with his
magnum opus, Megalexandros. The film is a blow to the heart of the established

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Left, and a total and radical deconstruction of its heroic imagery. The whole action
takes place in an allegorical space situated at the dawn of the twentieth century, a
focus for the international revolutionary movements that erupted throughout Europe
at that time. Yet it also provides a direct allusion to the movement of the popular Left
in Greece and to the myths feeding into that movement and also generated by it. In so
doing, the film lays bare the processes by which the myth of a homogeneous national
identity is constructed.

In the film, Megalexandros is a rebel chieftain who leads an agrarian uprising. His
image is a direct allusion to the leaders of the Left during the Greek Civil War and to
the mythic figure of the great leader. Angelopoulos makes visible the complex power
games involved at a given historical moment that becomes fetishised a posteriori,
under the banner of a unifying concept, in order to serve a nationalist or other
ideological agenda. In that case, the era of Megalexandros is not one marked by the
return of the King – in order to redeem the present and deliver the nation, or some
other collective body, towards redemption. Angelopoulos portrays the struggle
between different agents of power as yet another circular game, where one circle is
embedded in another. We, as viewers, are continuously confronted with the motif of
the circle, one that is endlessly repeated – both graphically, in the mise en scène, and
thematically, in the narrative.

As I have remarked, the film is a direct indictment of Stalinism and, by extension,

the high idealism of the Left as a whole. 6 By seizing power over the communards,
Megalexandros turns into a despot. The mythical hero turns from a radical image of
negation, a point of militancy against the established order of capital, into a new
power over the people that he represents. From an avant-garde point of view (which
aims at the dissolution of power) Megalexandros finds himself recuperated into the
status quo.

In the landscape of Megalexandros, there is no safe ground and no avant-garde point

of view. The communards of the utopian village, where Megalexandros finds refuge,
are not above criticism. In a sequence that is seldom discussed, we see the president

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of the assembly conducting a meeting in an empty hall after everybody has left the
room. What it shows is the inability of the communards to think on the spot, and
their need to follow a directive at all times

Megalexandros becomes a complex map between human agency and structure. At

the end of the film, we find out that Megalexandros has been used, that his power is
limited and that he is unable to deliver redemption. The film ends on an image of
ruination, followed immediately by one of hope. The villagers (in a reverse image of
Cronos eating his children) allegorically surround and consume Megalexandros
before the commune is destroyed. All that remains is a fragmented statue of
Megalexandros, lying in the middle of the village square and signifying the end of an
era. One little boy, however – Megalexandros’ son, Alexandros – manages to escape.
In a final allegorical image, we see him ride into Athens on a donkey in 1980, the
year in which the film was made.

It is from this image of ruination that the post-80s films will emerge. The director
becomes more personal as he moves into the 80s. From here onwards, Angelopoulos
focuses on the disillusioned movement of a solitary hero (with the exception of
Landscape in the Mist (1988) and The Weeping Meadow (2004) – where the main
characters are, respectively, two children and a woman). The films turn towards
semi-autobiographical narratives and the predominant motif is that of the journey.
What in the first period was the movement of collective bodies, mapped through the
distant gaze of the sequence shot, now turns into the wandering of the individual in a
present milieu marked by defeat and an omnipresent sense of melancholia.

With Voyage to Cythera (1983) Angelopoulos makes an inward shift, yet the social
outlook does not disappear, nor does it turn into a background for an a-historical
existential angst. The old man in Voyage and Spyros in The Beekeeper (1986) are
remnants of a past struggle that has known defeat. Their melancholia is not the effect
of a universally meaningless cosmos, but is seen as arising from the failure of past
struggles and dissolved ideals. Wandering thus becomes the major feature of the
director’s second period. As Vassiliki Kolocotroni points out, the cinema of

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Angelopoulos does not attempt to fix history on the screen. Rather, it records a
wandering deprived of a metaphysical existential plight. 7 History is seen as a process
of change, and the cinema of Angelopoulos records the anxieties and the struggles of
a given collective as it tries to establish itself in a given present. In the second period,
it is the individual confronted with an ever-increasing level of exploitation, loss of
orientation and a breakdown of borders different from that envisioned by any
socialist international movement. Angelopoulos marks the crisis of the subject from
the periphery of Europe, in a world where the reign of the free market seems
absolute. It is in the face of free-market enterprise that Angelopoulos lays bare the
terror induced by capitalism. One of the darkest facets of this terror is the bombing of
Yugoslavia, as we see in Ulysses’ Gaze (1995).

Angelopoulos marks a space where the anxiety caused by globalisation induces a

new search for identity throughout the Balkans. This search for identity, and the need
to map a direction for the future, creates a struggle where the present confronts the
past, where the new is haunted by iconic images and past identities. This haunting
becomes a virtual image for the wandering in Angelopoulos’ second period. The
confrontation with the past can be an element of nostalgia, as in the hero’s return to
his birthplace seen in The Beekeeper and Ulysses’ Gaze. In such cases, his return
marks the desire for a new beginning, and a change in direction on the map that leads
to the future. The return may seek to reconstruct a fragment of the past, which will
acquire a new meaning in the present and thus provide a new point of departure. The
search for the three lost reels in Ulysses’ Gaze is one such attempt. The refusal of
Spyros, in Voyage to Cythera, to sell his property to a multinational is yet another act
that acquires political connotations of dissent in the present. The return here signifies
an unfinished project that may lie buried in the past, but whose remains can still be
traced in the present. It is from these remains that a new beginning must arise.

Yet the return to the past can also take on shadowy and menacing connotations. It
can be reactionary, marking the return to the realm of the myth and to the mystifying
processes of religion, those same processes and mythical resurrections that allowed
Megalexandros to become the fetishised image of power. The past as a haunting

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image is mostly conjured in the allegorical image of the Father that becomes
predominant in its absence/presence, to quote Vassiliki Kolocotroni, and carries with
it a double register. 8 It is the lament for a universal safety that was lost together with
the demise of the grand ideologies of the Left, but it is also a warning that
totalitarianism can return in dark and ever-changing forms.

For this reason, I see The Suspended Step of the Stork as a film that stands out in this
second period. In this film, Angelopoulos moves to the borders of Greece, borders
that will be crossed in his subsequent film Ulysses’ Gaze. Angelopoulos marks the
trail of the new nomads, the waves of immigrants who swarm to the borders of
Fortress Europe in search of a new home. In The Suspended Step, a left-wing
politician who disappeared returns as a man without identity. His return, however,
does not mark the return of a monumental era, that of the heroic narratives of the Left
progressing towards the future. The Mastroianni no man is born out of the ruins of an
international socialist movement. His return is one of drifting, beyond the static
boundaries of state and property – beyond even the realm of action itself.
Mastroianni is not a figure to be imitated. Faced with the young Alexandros, who
searches in him for the static image of the Father, Mastroianni recedes into silence
and flight. The Father returns as a wandering immigrant and his journey is not that of
the avant-garde, but one of observation and contemplation. Like Benjamin’s Angelus
Novus, he keeps his distance and records the piling of wreckage upon wreckage.

Migration is a theme that is dealt with in all the films of Angelopoulos. In his first
feature film, Reconstruction (1970), the father is an emigrant returning from
Germany. Agamemnon in The Travelling Players is an immigrant from the coast of
Asia Minor. The Anarchists in Megalexandros are wandering immigrants in search
of a new cosmos that never comes. Spyros in Voyage to Cythera the last ghost of the
Civil War, returning from exile in the Soviet Union to exile at home.

Angelopoulos, however, does not place these figures under a single mythical banner
drawn from some universal essence. Their search for home does not form a coherent
identity or rule out the historical and social differences between them. With Ulysses’

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Gaze, Angelopoulos also makes visible the new waves of migrants forced out of their
homes due to the war in former Yugoslavia, and the Greek expatriates forced to leave
Constanţa in Romania due to the Stalinist purges of the 50s. Like the rootless
migrants in The Suspended Step – stuck on immobile trains at a border town in
northern Greece – and the Albanian children in Eternity and a Day, these new
nomads cannot be seen as a collective fighting its way into the future. Rather, they
provide an image of loss, a reminder of terror in everyday life, of people who do not
have the luxury of being united and may easily be drowned in the open seas – as we
see at the beginning of The Suspended Step.

Nevertheless, the image of migration – and I will call it a fragmented image because
of its many different historical facets – does appear in the films of Angelopoulos
with one degree of certainty. That is the principle of movement and change, which in
turn acquires dangerous connotations for a monumental idealist view of history that
refuses change. A nationalist history, for that matter, sees the presence of the
immigrant as a threat simply because the immigrant lays bare the fundamental myth
of nationalism, that of racial and national purity. Angelopoulos moves beyond
national borders and it is on this premise that he has called himself a humanist, on the
premise of wandering. In Eternity and a Day – without losing sight of the cultural,
social as well as ontological gap that exists between the young boy and the dying
intellectual – Angelopoulos marks the plight of ‘caring for the other’. Both characters
are united under the banner of ‘ksenitis’ (stranger). This is not an ideological banner,
nor does it carry a political agenda. It fails to acquire universal connotations, for it is
rooted in locality. Yet the image of ‘the wandering stranger’ that it denotes alludes to
totality in a manner similar to a Japanese haiku, which aims to encompass a deeper
unified realm beyond its fragmented image.

It is from this realm of the haiku that the wandering stranger (played by Marcello
Mastroianni) appears in The Suspended Step of the Stork only to disappear again at
the end of the film, which ends with the return of the Gaze from the side of the other.
Throughout the film, the camera has followed the main character, Alexandros, in his
quest to identify this ragged immigrant as the missing politician. At the film’s finale,

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the camera frames Alexandros as he stands by the river that serves as a natural border
between two states. It then recedes diagonally and withdraws into the river, as if
adopting the point of view of the other who stands beyond all borders – sustaining
the question that has haunted the film throughout, the question by which the missing
politician’s book ends: ‘How can we find a new collective dream?’

If we were to see the director’s late period as a quest towards this dream, we should
take note that this quest is not free of contradictions. These contradictions are more
visible than ever in his latest film The Weeping Meadow which, as noted in the
Introduction, this thesis has omitted as part of a trilogy that is not yet complete.
However, it is necessary to make a brief mention of this film in relation to the
director’s previous work.

The story of The Weeping Meadow starts in 1919 and ends in 1949 with the end of
the Civil War. It follows the fate of Eleni, who has come to Greece with her family
and other expatriates from Odessa, fleeing the purges of the Red Army. The refugees
build a village near Thessaloniki in the north of Greece. The two children – Eleni and
Alexis – grow up and fall in love, finally fleeing the village to escape from Alexis’
father, who plans to make Eleni his own bride. The film follows the couple as they
try to establish a life of their own, all the while avoiding the father’s pursuit. After
managing to create a family, the couple is separated by the events of the Second
World War. The film ends during the subsequent Greek Civil War, in which Eleni’s
two sons die while fighting on opposite sides.

In a motif familiar from The Travelling Players, Angelopoulos provides another

fresco of Modern Greece. Eleni becomes a witness to all the major events that shook
Greece in the period from 1919 to 1949. As in The Travelling Players, Angelopoulos
uses the structure of an ancient Greek myth. This time it is the myth of the ‘House of
Lavdakides’, which includes the Oedipus myth and (most notably) that of his sons
Eteocles and Polynices, who kill each other in the battle for the succession of his
throne in Thebes. However, the only element of the myth that is played out

308
significantly in the film is the killing of the two brothers during the Civil War; any
further mythic are not fully elaborated.

Nevertheless – in contrast to Angelopoulos’ previous work and despite the epic

proportions of the film – history appears as little more than a backdrop to the
psychological drama of the main characters. The film lapses into excessive
sentimentality, and continuous reference to the director’s previous work in terms of
imagery seems unfounded. Furthermore, the use of Eleni’s character as a stand-in for
the Greek nation reinforces static binarisms by which the feminine is associated with
passivity and innocence and, most importantly, an eternal image of motherhood. We
should note here that the image of Greece as a woman starts to appear as a constant
in Angelopoulos as early as The Beekeeper. This tendency rules out the woman as a
physical entity, or her life as a lived experience, and turns her into a screen on which
ideas can be projected. This method also feeds in to ideas generated by nationalism,
which the director unwillingly plays out. By associating Greece with the feminine,
Angelopoulos gives the nation an essence that runs counter to his previous work and
proves to be his blind spot. Ultimately, in contrast to The Travelling Players, this
new film confers on Greece a psychological profile – furthermore, that of the victim.

How, then, to conclude? Having established that the use of myth can possibly
reinforce static binarisms, we should bear in mind that Angelopoulos, as a
filmmaker, presents us with a grand vision in terms of both imagery and narrative
content. Preoccupied with the concept of community, he is one of the last European
filmmakers who still dare to make films on such a vast scale. His films constantly
pose the question of how one can represent this communal feeling. While the images
he creates may inspire us to awe, his is not a monumental view of life and society. As
a social being, Angelopoulos grew up with the grand narratives of the Left and its
teleological view of the road to Socialism. In terms of filmmaking, he belongs to the
aftermath of the period of great art-house auteurs such as Antonioni and Bergman –
a realm to which he sees himself as belonging. His films attempt to capture life on a
large scale, and his imagery is monumental in composition. Dealing with major

309
historical events and haunted by the dream of the Left, he sees life as composed of
equal parts of history and myth.

All this does not add up, however, to a monumental view on life. While his films
may encompass the dream of the Left, they do so on new and different terms – in
which the traditional Marxist teleology is replaced by hope. Angelopoulos’ films
record the passing of time and the process of wandering. In so doing, they make
visible that which has long failed to be represented, namely the concept of Utopia –
which is now transferred from some distant and nebulous future into the here and
now. This image of Utopia, marked by a hope, is inseparable from a melancholic
attachment to ruin – a vision that once was whole but is now broken and cannot, even
with the best of intentions, be put back together. Nor is it possible to form any
definitive image of what that total vision might be like. All that remains to us is
imagination or dreams. If the dream of a better future has given birth to nightmares,
and if the safety of a teleological narrative has elapsed, that is not in itself a reason to
despair – even if we retain the right to lament a dream that has shattered into
fragments. If the ruin is all we have, then it is that ruin which must give birth to a
new hope.

Afterword.

Throughout this thesis, I have drawn a map materialising from the principle of a
history of ruination and its political implications for the social life of today. I have
abstained from drawing binarisms between the cinematic and the social, as I wanted
to show that watching a film is not a break from life and history but, rather, a process
that feeds into and from it. What these films contain, among other attributes, is the
power of translation – a power that is embedded in any important work. One cannot
address a film and hope to translate it into one’s own life unless one is already
equipped with the desire for knowledge and love and the willingness to struggle.

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This does not mean that one has to have reached an accumulated state of knowledge
in order to properly understand the message of the films. For that matter, great films
do not convey messages. One must, however, desire to be involved in society and
one cannot expect to be guided towards it by a film. It also means that one’s desire is
affected, restricted or expanded by social and cinematic forces. Only through a
dialectical process between society and the self can we hope to build a solidarity that
overcomes exploitation and terror, a space in which human action can flourish, a
space that will also allow these films to come into full communion with their
audience. This thesis has been written in the modest hope of contributing, however
slightly, to that process.

1
Angelopoulos does not recreate an objective landscape that rules out the process of his interpretation.
Angelopoulos transcends an objective realist aesthetic that rules out whatever came after the events
depicted on screen and where the past appears unmediated. Yet he maintains a view that is at once
inside and outside the period depicted on screen with the attempt to explain the period as a whole. See
the Introduction p.10 and also the chapters on The Travelling players, The Hunters and
Megalexandros.
2
See the chapter on The Travelling Players pp.105-108.
3
See the chapter on The Travelling Players pp. 105-109.
4
See The Travelling Players pp. 94-97.
5
For further analysis between the aesthetic of the long take in relation to montage see Days of ’36 pp.
65-71.
6
See Megalexandros p. 152-159.
7
Vassiliki Kolocotroni, ‘Monuments of Time: The Works of Theo Angelopoulos’ in Post-War
Cinema and Modernity, ed. John Orr & Olga Taxidou, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2000,
p. 405.
8
Vassiliki Kolocotroni, ibid, p. 400.

311
312
 FILMOGRAPHY

FORMINX STORY (1965)

Remains incomplete.

BROADCAST / Η ΕΚΠΟΜΠΗ (1968)

Greece. Black & White. 23'.
Written and Directed by Theo Angelopoulos.
Cinematography: Giorgos Arvanitis. Editing: Giorgos Triantafyllou. Producer: Theo
Angelopoulos. Cast: Thodoros Katsadramis, Lina Triantafyllou, Nikos Mastorakis,
Mirka Kalatzopoulou.
1968: Thessaloniki Film Festival, Critics’ Prize.

RECONSTRUCTION / ΑΝΑΠΑΡΑΣΤΑΣΗ (1970)

Greece. Black & White. 110'.
Directed by Theo Angelopoulos.
Screenplay: Theo Angelopoulos with the participation of Stratis Karras, Thanasis
Valtinos. Cinematography: Giorgos Arvanitis. Editing: Takis Davlopoulos. Sound:
Thanasis Arvanitis. Cast: Toula Stathopoulou (Eleni), Giannis Totsikas (Rural
Guard), Thanos Grammenos (Eleni’s brother), Mihalis Fotopoulos (Eleni’s husband),
Petros Hoidas (District Attorney).
Producer: Giorgos Samiotis. Production Management: Christos Paligiannopoulos.
1970: Thessaloniki Film Festival – Best Director, Best Cinematography, Best Film,
Best Actress, Critic’s Prize
1971: Georges Sadoul Prize (Best Film of the Year Shown in France).
1971: Best Foreign Film at the Hyéres Festival.
1971: ‘Special Reference’ by FRIPESCI (International Film Critics’ Association) in
‘Forum’ at Berlin Festival.

DAYS OF ’36 / ΜΕΡΕΣ ΤΟΥ ’36 (1972)

Greece. Colour. 110'.
Directed by Theo Angelopoulos.
Screenplay: Theo Angelopoulos with the participation of Petros Markaris, Thanasis
Valtinos, Stratis Karras. Cinematography: Giorgos Arvanitis. Editing: Vasilsis
Spyropoulos. Production Design: Mikes Karapiperis. Sound: Thanasis Arvanitis.
Music: Giorgos Papastefanou. Cast: Kostas Pavlou (Sophianos), Petros Zarkadis
(Lukas), Christoforos K. Nezer (Director of the Prison), Yiannis Kandilas (Kriezis),
Vangelis Kazan (Executioner).
Producer: Giorgos Papalios. Production Management: Giorgos Samiotis.
1972: Thessaloniki Film Festival – Best Director Best Cinematography.
1972: FRIPESCI (International Film Critics’ Association) Best Film, Berlin Fest.

313
THE TRAVELLING PLAYERS/O ΘΙΑΣΟΣ (1975)
Greece. Colour. 230'.
Written and Directed by Theo Angelopoulos.
Cinematography: Giorgos Arvanitis. Assistant Cinematographer: Vasilis
Christomoglou, Production Design: Mikes Karapiperis. Editing: Takis Davlopoulos,
Giorgos Triantafillou. Sound: Thanasis Arvanitis. Music: Loukianos Kilaidonis,
Original songs selected by Fotos Lambrinos. Cast: Eva Kotamanidou (Elektra),
Alikh Georgouli (Mother), Stratos Pachis (Father), Maria Vasileiou (Chrysothemis),
Vangelis Kazan (Aigisthos), Petros Zarkaris (Orestes), Kyriakos Katrivanos
(Pylades), Grigoris Evangelatos (Poet).
Producer: Giorgos Papalios. Production Management: Stephanos Vlachos.
1975: FRIPESCI (International Film Critics’ Association) Best Film Award, Cannes
Festival.
1975: Thessaloniki Film Festival – Best Film, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best
Actor (Vangelis Kazan), Best Actress (Eva Kotamanidou), Best film according to the
Greek Critics’ Association.
1975: Interfilm Prize (Best Film in ‘Forum’ at Berlin Festival).
1975: Âge d’ Or Prize (Best film of the Year Shown in Belgium).
1976: Figueira das Foss Prize, Portugal.
1979: B.F.I. Prize (Best film of the Year Shown in the U.K.)
Italians Critics Association: Best Film in the World, 1970-1980.
FRIPESCI: 44th Top Film in the History of Cinema.

THE HUNTERS / ΟΙ ΚΥΝΗΓΟΙ (1977)

Greece. Colour. 165'.
Directed by Theo Angelopoulos.
Screenplay: Theo Angelopoulos with the participation of Stratis Karras.
Cinematography: Giorgos Arvanitis. Production Design: Mikes Karapiperis. Editing:
Giorgos Triantafillou. Sound: Thanasis Arvanitis. Music: Loukianos Kilaidonis.
Cast: Vangelis Kazan (the Hotel Owner), Betty Valasi (his wife), Giannis Danis (the
Industrialist), Mary Chronopoulou (his wife), Ilias Stamatiou (the Publisher), Aliki
Georgouli (his wife), Nikos Kouros (the General), Eva Kotamanidou (his wife),
Stratos Pachis ( the Civil Engineer), Christoforos K. Nezer (the Politician), Dimitris
Kamperidis (Giannis).
Producer: Theo Angelopoulos with the participation of INA and ZDF. Executive
Producer: Nikos Angelopoulos. Production Management: Stephanos Vlachos.
1977: Cannes Film Festival, Special Recognition.
1977: Chicago Film Festival, Golden Hugo (Best Film).
1977: Thessaloniki Anti-Festival - Best Film, Best Director.
1977: Prize from the Greek film Critics’ Association.

MEGALEXANDROS /Ο ΜΕΓΑΛΕΞΑΝΤΡΟΣ (1980)

Greece - Italy. Colour. 210'.
Directed by Theo Angelopoulos.

314
Screenplay: Theo Angelopoulos with the participation of Petros Markaris
Cinematography: Giorgos Arvanitis. Production Design: Mikes Karapiperis. Editing:
Giorgos Triantafillou. Sound: Argyris Lazaridis. Cast: Omero Antonutti
(Megalexandros), Eva Kotamanidou (his daughter), Grigoris Evanelatos (the
Schoolteacher), Michalis Yannatos (Dragoumanos), Laura de Marchi - Francesco
Ranelutti - Brizio Montinaro - Norman Mozato (Italian Anarchists), Christophoros
K. Nezer (Landowner Tzelepis).
Producer: R.A.I., Z.D.F., Theo Angelopoulos Productions, Greek Film Centre.
Executive Producer: Phoebe Stavropoulou, Production Management: Stephanos
Vlachos.
1980: Golden Lion and International Film Critics Award (FIPRESCI), Venice Film
Festival.
1980: Thessaloniki Film Festival, Greek Critics’ Association Prize.

ONE VILLAGE, ONE VILLAGER / XΩΡΙΟ ΕΝΑ, ΚΑΤΟΙΚΟΣ ΕΝΑΣ (1981)

Greece. Colour. 20'.
Directed by Theo Angelopoulos.
Screenplay: Theo Angelopoulos based on an idea of Kostas Revanis.
Cinematography: Giorgos Arvanitis. Editing: Giorgos Triantafillou. Sound: Thanasis
Arvanitis.
Producer: YENED (Greek Television).

ATHENS: RETURN TO THE ACROPOLIS / ΑΘΗΝΑ ΕΠΙΣΤΡΟΦΗ ΣΤΗΝ

ΑΚΡΟΠΟΛΗ (1983)
Greece. Colour. 43'.
Directed by Theo Angelopoulos.
Cinematography: Giorgos Arvanitis. Production Design: Mikes Karapiperis. Editing:
Giorgos Triantafillou. Sound: Thanasis Georgiadis. Music:Manos Hadzidakis,
Loukianis Kilaidonis, Dionysis Savopoulos. Poetry: Giorgos Seferis, Tasos
Levaditis.
Producer: Trans World Film, ERT-RTV ELLENICA, Theo Angelopoulos.

VOYAGE TO CYTHERA / ΤΑΞΙΔΙ ΣΤΑ ΚΥΘΗΡΑ (1984)

Greece. Colour. 137'.
Directed by Theo Angelopoulos.
Screenplay: Theo Angelopoulos in collaboration with Dimitris Nollas; special
collaboration also by Tonino Guerra.
Cinematography: Giorgos Arvanitis. Production Design: Mikes Karapiperis. Editing:
Giorgos Triantafillou. Music: Eleni Karaindrou. Cast: Manos Katrakis (Old man
Spyros), Giulio Brogi (Alexandros), Mary Chronopoulou (Voula), Dionyssis
Papayannopoulos (Antonis), Dora Volanaki (Katerina, old woman - Spyros' wife),
Athinodoros Proussalis (Police captain).
Producer: The Greek Film Centre, Z.D.F., Channel 4, R.A.I., Greek Television,
Theo Angelopoulos Productions. Production Management: Giorgos Samiotis, Pavlos
Ksenakis, Phoebe Stavropoulou, Vera Likouresi.

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1984: Cannes Film Festival, Best Screenplay
1984: FRIPESCI (International Film Critics’ Association) Award, Cannes Film
Festival, Best Film.
1984: Greek National Award, Best Film, Best Script, Best Actor (Manos Katrakis),
Best Actress (Dora Volanaki).

THE BEEKEEPER / Ο ΜΕΛΙΣΣΟΚΟΜΟΣ (1986)

Greece. Colour. 120'.
Directed by Theo Angelopoulos.
Screenplay: Theo Angelopoulos, Dimitris Nollas. Special collaboration by Tonino
Guerra.
Cinematography: Giorgos Arvanitis. Production Design: Mikes Karapiperis. Editing:
Takis Yannopoulos. Music: Eleni Karaindrou (Saxophone: Jan Garbarek). Cast:
Marcello Mastroianni (Spyros), Nadia Mourouzi (the girl), Serge Reggiani (the sick
man), Jenny Roussea (Spyros' wife), Dinos Iliopoulos (Spyros' friend – Cinema
owner).
Producer: Greek Film Centre, ERT-1 TV (Greece), Paradis Films (Paris),
Basicinematografica (Rome), Theo Angelopoulos Productions. Production
Management: Aimilios Konitsiotis.

LANDSCAPE IN THE MIST / ΤΟΠΙΟ ΣΤΗΝ ΟΜΙΧΛΗ (1988)

Greece. Colour. 125'.
Directed by Theo Angelopoulos.
Screenplay: Theo Angelopoulos with the participation of Thanasis Valtinos and
Tonino Guerra.
Cinematography: Giorgos Arvanitis. Production Design: Mikes Karapiperis. Editing:
Yannis Tsitsopoulos. Music: Eleni Karaindrou. Cast: Tania Palaiologou (Voula),
Michalis Zeke (Alexander), Stratos Tzortzoglou (Orestes).
Producer: Greek Film Centre, Greek Television (ERT-1), Paradis Films (Paris),
Basicinematografica (Rome) and Theo Angelopoulos Productions. Production
Management: Aimilios Konitsiotis, Dominique Toussaint.
1988: Silver Lion Award for Best Director, Venice Film Festival.
1989: Felix (Best European Film of the Year) Award,
1989: Golden Hugo Award for Best Director,
1989: Silver Plaque for Best Cinematography, Chicago Film Festival.

THE SUSPENDED STEP OF THE STORK / TO ΜΕΤΕΩΡΟ ΒΗΜΑ ΤΟΥ

ΠΕΛΑΡΓΟΥ (1991)
Greece. Colour. 138'.
Directed by Theo Angelopoulos.
Screenplay: Theo Angelopoulos with the participation of Tonino Guerra, Petros
Markaris, Thanassis Valtinos.
Cinematography: Giorgos Arvanitis. Production Design: Mikes Karapiperis. Editing:
Yannis Tsitsopoulos. Music: Eleni Karaindrou. Cast: Marcello Mastroianni (the

316
politician who disappeared), Jeanne Moreau (his wife), Gregory Karr (Alexander, the
journalist), Ilias Logothetis (the colonel), Dora Chrysikou (the young bride), Dimitris
Poulikakos (television cameraman).
Producer: Greek Film Centre, Theo Angelopoulos Productions, Arena Films
(France), Vega Films (Switzerland), Erre Produzioni (Italy). Production
Management: Emilios Konitsiotis, Pier Alain Shatzman.

ULYSSES’ GAZE / ΤΟ ΒΛΕΜΜΑ ΤΟΥ ΟΔΥΣΣΕΑ (1995)

Greece. Colour. 176'.
Directed by Theo Angelopoulos.
Screenplay: Theo Angelopoulos with the participation of Tonino Guerra, Petros
Markaris.
Cinematography: Giorgos Arvanitis. Production Design: Giorgos Patsas, Miodrag
Mile Nicolic. Editing: Yannis Tsitsopoulos. Music: Eleni Karaindrou. Cast: Harvey
Keitel (A), Maia Morgenstern (woman in Florina/Penelope, Kali/Calypso,
widow/Circe, Naomi Levi/Nausica), Erland Josephson (Ivo Levy), Thanassis Vengos
(taxi driver), Giorgos Michalakopoulos (Nikos), Dora Volanaki (old lady in
Albania), Mania Papadimitriou (the mother in A's memory).
Production: Theo Angelopoulos Productions, Greek Film Centre, MEGA Channel,
Paradis Film, La Generale d'Images, La Sept Cinema, with the participation of Canal
+, Basic Cinematografica, Instituto Luce, RAI, Tele-Muenchen, Concorde Films,
Herbert Kloider and in association with Channel 4. Producers: Giorgio Silvagni, Eric
Heumann, Dragan Ivanovic-Hevi, Ivan Milovanovic. Executive Producer: Phoebe
Economopoulos, Production Management: Kostas Lambropoulos.
1995: Grand Jury Prize and International Critics' Prize, Cannes Film Festival.
1995: Felix of the Critics (Film of the Year).

ETERNITY AND A DAY / ΜΙΑ ΑΙΩΝΙΟΤΗΤΑ ΚΑΙ ΜΙΑ ΜΕΡΑ (1998)

Greece. Colour. 130'.
Directed by Theo Angelopoulos.
Screenplay: Theo Angelopoulos with the participation of Tonino Guerra, Petros
Markaris.
Cinematography: Giorgos Arvanitis, Andreas Sinanos. Production Design: Giorgos
Ziakas, Kostas Dimitriadis. Editing: Yannis Tsitsopoulos. Music: Eleni Karaindrou.
Cast: Bruno Ganz (Alexander), Fabrizio Bentivoglio (the Poet), Isabelle Renauld
(Anna), Achilleas Skevis (as the boy), Eleni Gerasimidou (Urania), Iris
Hatziantoniou (Alexander's daughter), Nikos Kolovos (the doctor).
Producer: Theo Angelopoulos, Greek Film Centre, Greek Television ET1, Paradis
Films, Intermedias S.A , LA SEPT CINEMA A Greek-French-Italian Co-production.
Executive Producer: Phoebe Economopoulos. Production Management: Lefteris
Charonitis, Nikos Sekeris.
1998: Palme d'Or, Cannes Film Festival.

317
TRILOGY 1: THE WEEPING MEADOW / ΤΡΙΛΟΓΙΑ 1: ΤΟ ΛΙΒΑΔΙ ΠΟΥ
ΔΑΚΡΥΖΕΙ (2004)
Greece. Colour. 300'.
Directed by Theo Angelopoulos.
Screenplay: Theo Angelopoulos, Tonino Guerra. Special collaboration in the script:
Petros Markaris, Giorgio Silvagni.
Cinematography: Andreas Sinanos. Editing: Giorgos Triantafyllou. Production
Design: Giorgos Patsas, Costas Dimitriadis. Music: Eleni Karaindrou. Cast:
Alexandra Aidini, Nikos Poursanidis, Giorgos Armenis, Vassilis Kolovos Eva
Kotamanidou, Toula Stathopoulou.
Producer: Theo Angelopoulos, Greek Film Center, Hellenic Broadcasting
Corporation ERT S.A., Attica Art Productions (Athens), BAC Films S.A,
Intermedias S.A, Arte France. Executive Producer: Phoebe Economopoulos.

318
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