The Films of Theo Angelopoulos: Landscapes of Time

Fourteen films will be showing from October 13 to December 18, 2022 at the Billy Wilder Theater in Westwood with free tickets and free parking thanks to an anonymous donor to the Hammer Museum. Sponsored by UCLA’s Stavros Niarchos Foundation Center for the Study of Hellenic Culture, UCLA Center for European and Russian Studies and the Consulate General of Greece in Los Angeles, the kickoff film, ‘Landscapes in the Mist’ played to a full house.

How did all these people know Theodoros Angelopoulos? I thought he was my own private guilty pleasure, my own discovery from the days when I would spend the last day of every film festival where I was working to see a film I wanted to see, knowing I would never be able to convince my company to buy it. It was at the Thessaloniki Film Festival 1991 when I first saw an Angelopoulis film, The Suspended Step of the Stork starring Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau. I had never seen such a film with the story only revealing its impact at the end. I had seen slow films of Antonioni (not knowing his screenwriter was the same who wrote Angelopoulos’s films), but this film was so unlike any film I had ever seen before. I barely understood what was happening until the end when story revealed the inner core of its truth. At that moment, I knew that the film had changed my life and my perceptions. This was the first in Angelopoulos’ Trilogy of Borders.

‘Suspended Step of the Stork’

As of this writing, two films have screened thus far: Landscape in the Mist (European Film Award for Best Film), the last of his Trilogy of Silence. It was followed the next week by Eternity and a Day (Palme d’Or at the 51st edition of the Cannes Film Festival), the last of his Trilogy of Borders. Having seen these two, so many questions arose for me that I knew I needed to find out more about Angelopoulos himself.

Why these trilogies? Does he always work in threes, making trilogies and why?

Why were both Eternity and a Day and Landscape in the Mist about a little boy Alexander who has no parents, and most particularly no father? Is Alexander in all his films?

What’s with the troupe of actors which keeps showing up in Landscape in the Mist and is central to The Traveling Players his Trilogy of History?

Why are there always three yellow jacketed bicycle riders in the two films I have so far seen?

Why is there always a wedding — sometimes happy, sometimes not so?

Critic Andrew Horton calls Angelopoulos’ films, “Cinema of Contemplation” which does give the context within which one derives the full impact of his stories, more through contemplation than through following a plot line which nevertheless exists. Angelopoulos believed cinema was creating a new form of universal communication. He also saw his own life as a continuation of Greek history from the beginning of time, a theme he reiterates in his films. To absorb such a large picture, one must be in a contemplative state of mind. The films provide a framework for meditation. And his end shot is more than once a line of yellow jacketed repair workers climbing telephone poles that extend beyond the horizon or riding bicycles to beyond the frame of what we see. I must see the rest of the films to know what these repairmen are doing to extend travel and communication beyond borders.

Angelopoulos views the world through the eyes of a child named Alexander who in Landscape in the Mist is about five and is traveling across Greece to Germany with his ten year old sister Voula to find the father they have never known. They recognize they are part of a story with no end. The only adult words describing their odyssey are in the bedtime story Voula tells Alexander; in the introduction to a staged play that the friend they find on the road, named Orestes, describes to them; and in the first words spoken by a singing actor as the traveling theater troupe is about to start performing the play. But, as in the bedtime story and in Orestes’ description, the play, seemingly interrupted by other events, never finishes. The story starts, “in the beginning is darkness, then comes light, then the sea and sky, then the plants and trees.” When his sister feels fear for what lies ahead, Alexander comforts her with his promise to continue telling the story that never finishes. Through the mist, they find the tree, so vaguely described by Orestes as he shows them blank frames of a 35mm piece of film he picks up and so materially there in front of them when they cross the last border to Germany. They hug its trunk in relief and renewed trust in the will of some higher order that they have arrived safely.

Landscape in the Mist is the last of the Trilogy of Silence, haunting, incisive, intimate, and deeply moving odysseys that navigate through consciousness, myth, and memory. Landscape in the Mist represents the “silence of God”. The other two parts are the “silence of history” in Voyage to Cythera (1984) and the “silence of love” in The Beekeeper [1986).

In Eternity and a Day, the child in himself, Alexander (Bruno Ganz), has become a great writer and poet who is now facing his final days of a fatal illness. Putting his affairs in order and bidding farewell to family and friends before admitting himself into the hospital where he will await death, he asks “How long is tomorrow?” and is told, it is “eternity and a day.” He finds himself paired on his last day with a child, an Albanian illegal of Greek origin who fears the future with no adult to guide him into an unknown land across the sea. The poet himself lacks to words to finish his own work let alone help the child with his fears and his own journey, but his redemption comes from a literal exchange of words through the child which allows him to transcend his life and his emotional distance.

The three words Alexander receives from the Albanian boy are korfulamu, a delicate word for the heart of a flower, a literal ‘word of comfort’ for his physical suffering. The second is xenitis, the feeling of being a stranger everywhere, including with his own beautiful wife Anna (Isabelle Renauld). and daughter. The third is argathini, meaning ‘very late at night’, a metaphor for the ‘twilight’ of his existence.

The story that never finishes is the human odyssey of migrations and crossing borders, both in lands and in our minds as we face unknown futures in landscapes we do not recognize as our own. Angelopoulos’ reality unfolds through the prism of his memories. And he counts himself lucky to have lived consciously within the context of history. His memories are a continuation of the long history of Greece. He was born in 1935 the year before King George II of Greece returned to Rome with his Prime Minister Metaxas who, with the agreement of the king, suspended the parliament and established the quasi-fascist Metaxas regime. He lived through World War II, the subsequent Civil War, and the military dictatorship of 1967–1974.

He sees his films not as psychological studies of characters but as characters’ personal lives within a historical context, of “finding one’s own history within the history of a place.” He considers his political films quite different from those of Costa Gavras’ whose he calls bourgeois.

Starting with The Iliad, The Odyssey, and later the concluding Aeneid, continuing with the classic tretralogies, cycles of three plays by the great playwrights Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, Angelopoulis likewise writes in trilogies, three tragedies intended to be seen in one sitting, but way too long for most of us modern westerners. The trilogies of Angelopoulos would have greater impact if we could see them sequentially, even if not in one sitting. But the programmers did not see it that way and so we must see each film (which stands on its own) interspersed in what seems to be a random order. Even so, the themes intertwine seamlessly creating a textile of modern Greek myth, thought and insight.

Angelopoulos created Days of ’36 in 1972. It is the first film of what would become his self-described Trilogy of History that also includes The Traveling Players (1975) and Alexander the Great (1980) with an epilogue of The Hunters (1977). (The Greek plays also had epilogues.) That he made the first two films in Greece during the dictatorship required an “imposed silence” and indeed, that is the prevalent element in Days of ’36, the story of the country’s ruling leisure class suppressing the fight of leftist labor. The film begins with the assassination of a labor organizer and ends with a mafiosa-type last word of the ruling class which needs stability at any cost.

In The Traveling Players, Senses of Cinema writes:

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

Again, from Senses of Cinema:

Angelopoulos returned to the theme of the nation’s historically organic, cross-cultural migration in The Travelling Players to examine the the refugee’s resigned sentiment, “We’ve crossed the border and we’re still here. How many borders must we cross to reach home?”, carries through to the makeshift, outdoor cinema in Angelopoulos’ next film, Ulysses’ Gaze, as A arrives for an unauthorized screening of his film. Like the adrift Spyros in The Beekeeper, A’s devastating emotional odyssey through his ancestral homeland is also a personal journey to reconnect with his cultural past, striving to recapture the purity of human vision that has been tainted by romantic loss, artistic controversy, familial estrangement, ideological disillusionment, and the ravages of war.

Regarding the written words of the scripts, Angelopoulos consistently worked with the Italian screenwriter Tonino Guerra, who also frequently collaborated with such celebrated directors as Federico Fellini, Michaelangelo Antonioni (he wrote all of his movies’ scripts) and Francesco Rossi. Guerra consulted on The Dust of Time, cowrote The Weeping Meadow, Eternity and a Day, Ulysses’ Gaze, and wrote The Suspended Step of the Stork, Landscape in the Mist, The Beekeeper and Voyage to Cythera.

Angelopoulos also collaborated regularly with the cinematographer Giorgos Arvanitis and the composer Eleni Karaindrou, both of whom are essential to his works’ impact.

One of the recurring themes of his work is immigration, the flight from homeland and the return, as well as the history of 20th century Greece. Angelopoulos was considered by British film critics Derek Malcolm and David Thomson to be one of the world’s greatest directors.

Angelopoulos died late 24 January 2012, several hours after being involved in an crash while shooting the last film of his latest trilogy on modern Greece, The Other Sea in Athens. On that evening, the filmmaker had been with his crew in the area of Drapetsona, near Piraeus when he was hit by a motorcycle ridden by an off-duty police officer. The crash occurred when Angelopoulos, 76, attempted to cross a busy road. The first two films were The Weeping Meadow (2004)) and The Dust of Time (2008).

As his legacy lives on, it reminds those of us who contemplate time and space that our Western Civilization began when Greece’s voice was raised to express our most primal emotions in its tragedies. Angelopouos’ work, along with the oldest epic cycle and the Greek tragedies, all deal with the aftermath of world shaking wars which are the results of revenge and murder, sex and power wielded by those more powerful than even the king despots of the age, but by the gods themselves (whoever she is).