Theodoros Angelopoulos

Theodoros Angelopoulos b. April 27, 1935, Athens, Greece

In Theo Angelopoulos' haunting fable odyssey, Landscape in the Mist (1988), an adolescent girl named Voula (Tania Palaiologou) begins to tell a bedtime story to her younger brother Alexander (Michalis Zeke) before being interrupted by the sound of their mother's approaching footsteps. Disappointed, Alexander impatiently complains, "This story will never get finished." It is an innocent observation that appropriately characterizes Angelopoulos' epic and distinctive native cinema as well. From the absence of the conventional word 'End' at the conclusion of his films to his penchant for interweaving variations of episodes from his earlier films (which, in turn, are often culled from personal experience) to create interconnected 'chapters' (1) of a continuous, unfinished work, Angelopoulos' cinema is both intimately autobiographical and culturally allegorical and, like the children of Landscape in the Mist, traverses a metaphysical plane where the real and the mythic figuratively (and sublimely) intersect to map the organic and borderless landscape of the Greek soul.

From an early age, Angelopoulos' artistic role as a figurative chronicler of the contemporary Greek experience seemed fated. A self-described 'war child', (2) he was born during the dictatorship of General Metaxas on April 27, 1935 to a middle class merchant family. His earliest childhood memories innately reflected a broader national trauma—the sound of air raid sirens and the sight of Germans entering Athens following the Italian invasion of Greece in 1940—an indelible image that he later recreates from memory for the opening scene of Voyage to Cythera (1983). During the war years, his father, an unassuming and diligent shopkeeper named Spyros, and his disciplinarian mother, Katerina, struggled to provide for young Theo and his siblings Nikos, Haroula, and Voula, but like all Greek families of the time, were profoundly marked by the experience of great hardship, economic austerity, and hunger. The sensitive and thoughtful filmmaker would be further affected by two traumatic events in his youth: the Christmastime arrest and disappearance of his father during the period known as 'Red December' in 1944 after being informed on by a cousin for not supporting the communist party at the outbreak of Civil War (an incident that is alluded to in The Travelling Players [1975] and Ulysses' Gaze [1995]), and the death of his sister Voula from a childhood illness at the age of 11.



Ulysses' Gaze
After his father's arrest, Angelopoulos began to write poetry—a creative medium that he still considers to be the most important artistic influence in his life—even as he seemed destined to inherit his uncle's legal practice. Nevertheless, young Angelopoulos proceeded to study law at the University of Athens, but left shortly before graduation for his compulsory military service and, upon returning, decided instead to travel to Paris in order to study literature, film, and anthropology at the Sorbonne under the tutelage of Claude Lévi-Strauss (whose theory on the universal, cross-cultural structure of myth undoubtedly influenced Angelopoulos' mythically allusive approach to cinema). In 1962, he entered the prestigious French film academy, IDHEC (Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques) but was expelled from the program after his first year, purportedly for arrogance and lack of discipline. (3) He then enrolled in a workshop at the Musée de L'Homme where he studied the techniques of cinéma verité under famed ethnographer and documentarian Jean Rouch. After completing the course, Angelopoulos was inspired to create his first film and sought assistance from his former IDHEC colleagues to shoot a 16mm short film entitled Black and White, a paean to film noir about a man being mysteriously pursued by unknown entities throughout Paris. Unfortunately, his limited budget was insufficient to cover the cost of developing a working print and, consequently, was never able to reclaim his film. The real-life episode would ironically parallel the introductory premise of Ulysses' Gaze as a disenchanted Greek-American director, known only as A (Harvey Keitel), obsessively searches for three lost, undeveloped reels by Balkan film pioneers, the Manakia brothers that represent the first film from the region: the pure, cinematic 'first gaze' that he believes will restore his own corrupted artistic vision.

While still assessing his prospects for a career in the French film industry, Angelopoulos returned home to Athens and, on an impulse, accepted a position as a film critic for a left-wing newspaper called Demokratiki Allaghi, a decision that he explains had resulted from the trauma of being assaulted by the police during a pro-Papandreou student demonstration in 1964. He continued to work for the periodical until its abolition in 1967 during a crackdown on radical opposition by the military junta of Colonel Papadopoulos. It was during his tenure at Demokratiki Allaghi that he was recruited for a promotional film project by Greek composer Vangelis for his musical group Forminx for an upcoming American tour which, despite Angelopoulos' premature dismissal, proves noteworthy in that it provided the young filmmaker with the funding that he needed to shoot his first (released) short film: an experimental satire on finding (or more appropriately, creating) the 'ideal man' entitled Broadcast (1968) which was awarded the Critics' Prize at the Thessaloniki Film Festival.

For his first feature film, Angelopoulos reveals the influence of his documentary training under Jean Rouch, drawing inspiration from a real-life murder of a guest worker by his wife and her lover after returning home from Germany. Creating an episodically non-sequential film-within-a-film entitled Reconstruction (1970), the deeply conscientious filmmaker uses the potentially salacious narrative material to present a broader social and anthropological commentary on the dying of the Greek village—and consequently, the essence of the Greek soul—a cultural preoccupation that he subsequently discusses in an interview with Andrew Horton in 1993:
The village is a complete world in miniature. The old Greek villages had a spirit, a life, full of work and play and festivity. Of course, Greek villages began to depopulate by the turn of the century, but it was really World War II and the subsequent Civil War in Greece that completely destroyed the reality and concept of the Greek village. Our whole way of life was changed by these two catastrophes.

…The changes [to the village-centered nation] would have been made in a much more gradual and gentle way. You have to understand that part of the result of these wars was that in the 1950s over 500,000 village men went to Germany in particular, but also America and Australia, etc., to become guest workers. That meant a big shift in village life. Suddenly the men were gone and the women remained. With all these changes, the spirit of the villages began to die. (4)

Even with his earliest feature, Angelopoulos already provides a glimpse of his innately personal cinema through the opening sequence of the husband Costas (Michalis Photopoulos) returning to Epirus one day after an extended sojourn as an overseas guest worker—an autobiographical incident drawn from the unexpected reappearance of Angelopoulos' own father after months of uncertainty over his fate following his arrest (the family had already become resigned to the tragic probability that he had been executed).

A Trilogy of History



The Travelling Players
Continuing in the vein of reflecting the dynamic cultural landscape of rural Greece through episodes from contemporary history, Angelopoulos created Days of '36 (1972), the first film of what would become his self-described trilogy of history that also includes The Travelling Players and O Megalexandros (1980). (5) Ostensibly inspired by an actual prison hostage situation involving a parliament official in 1936, the film is also a subversive indictment of the corruption and incompetence of the then-ruling military junta (1967–1975) whose heavy-handed method of governance and retention of power relied on violence, intimidation, and censorship of the opposition.

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

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



O Megalexandros
The problematic pattern of foreign intervention in Greek sovereignty that is depicted in The Travelling Players is also visible in O Megalexandros, a densely structured film that interweaves two of Angelopoulos' predilections—history (the late 19th century kidnapping of aristocratic British tourists by Greek bandits in Marathon) and myth (the bandit leader who believes that he is the reincarnation of Megalexandros (6))—into a provocative examination on the destruction of myth, both as a heroic figure (Alexander the Great) and as an ideology (utopia). Even at this early juncture, Angelopoulos' cinema had begun to reflect on the failed idealism of his generation, a disillusionment that he would subsequently articulate through the elegiac image of Lenin's dismantled statue aboard a drifting salvage barge in Ulysses' Gaze.

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

A Trilogy of Silence

Having brought his provocative re-evaluation of 20th century Greek history to modern day Greece, Angelopoulos then sought to capture the human toll of its tragic legacy. The result is a series of haunting, incisive, intimate, and deeply moving odysseys that navigate through consciousness, myth, and memory that the filmmaker describes as the trilogy of silence: the silence of history (Voyage to Cythera), the silence of love (The Beekeeper [1986]), and the silence of God (Landscape in the Mist). (7)



Voyage to Cythera
Voyage to Cythera follows the plight of a returning political exile (Manos Katrakis) during the general amnesty of the 1970s, a communist and Civil War partisan fighter who, 32 years earlier, had re-established a new life in Tashkent in the former Soviet Republic of Uzbekistan. Similar to Reconstruction, the film-within-a-film narrative of Voyage to Cythera provides a structural metaphor for a displaced father (who, like Angelopoulos' long-absent father, is also named Spyros) attempting to rebuild his former life and reconnect with his family, only to find that in the wake of devastating wars, abandoned villages, and commercial development, the idea of home has become a myth.

In contrast to the poignant, yet affirming and transcendent parting image of the cast-off and adrift, but reunited aging lovers in Voyage to Cythera, The Beekeeper is a dark and somber portrait of profound disconnection, loneliness, and obsolescence. The film chronicles the aimless life of a middle-aged, recently separated schoolteacher named Spyros (Marcello Mastroianni) who, dispirited by the loss of his beloved daughter through marriage, embarks on his family's traditional vocation of apiculture and travels southward on an undefined, instinctual springtime migration. Desperately attempting to connect with the realities of an unfamiliar modern world through a promiscuous, rootless, Western pop culture-addicted young hitchhiker (Nadia Mourouzi) who seems oblivious of the past, Spyros represents the lost generation of Greeks who, like Angelopoulos' father, have become irrelevant, anecdotal relics within their own country after decades of divisive wars, economic turmoil, and unstable governments.

As Spyros searches for elemental connection by following in the path of his forefathers, so too is Landscape in the Mist a journey towards a mythical origin as two siblings, Voula and Alexander, attempt to find their unknown and essentially nonexistent biological father who, their mother evasively (and conveniently) explains, lives in Germany. Guided by daydreamed, unanswered missives to their eternally silent father, the children's odyssey is an existential quest for ancestral identity and community. From this perspective, the reprised roles of the itinerant, traditional stage actors from The Travelling Players in the film may be seen, not only as a self-referential farewell to the trauma of mid 20th century Greek history, but also as a melancholic observation on the nebulous direction and seemingly inevitable extinction of Greek cultural identity towards the end of the 20th century: an uncertainty that is symbolically encapsulated by the children's surreal observation of a large, spinning, disembodied stone hand with a missing index finger rising from the sea.

A Trilogy of 'Borders' (8)

With the escalating ethnic turmoil in the Balkan region during the 1990s, Angelopoulos returned to the theme of the nation's historically organic, cross-cultural migration in The Travelling Players to examine the artificially divisive nature of geographic borders. In The Suspended Step of the Stork (1991), a reporter named Alexander (Gregory Carr), on assignment near the Greece–Turkey border, encounters a refugee (Marcello Mastroianni) who bears a resemblance to a politician who, years earlier, had abandoned his wife (Jeanne Moreau) and disappeared. Culminating in the memorable wedding sequence of the refugee's daughter (Dora Chrysikou) marrying her childhood love from the opposite side of the Evros River, Angelopoulos illustrates, not only the painful absurdity and human consequence of arbitrary, man-made frontiers, but also humanity's innate capacity to transcend these restrictive barriers: a theme that is illustrated in the parting shot of a line of yellow jacketed (a familiar, idiosyncratic image in Angelopoulos' cinema) repair workers climbing telephone poles that extend beyond the horizon.

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.



Eternity and a Day
Following the epic scope of Ulysses' Gaze, Angelopoulos then created what is perhaps his most intimate and introspective work to date, Eternity and a Day (1998), the story of a terminally ill writer and poet named Alexander (Bruno Ganz) who settles his personal affairs and bids farewell to family and friends, having decided to admit himself into the hospital on the following day where he will spend his remaining days awaiting death. Alternately struggling to reconcile with his emotional abandonment of his late wife Anna (Isabelle Renauld) and aiding the plight of a young Albanian orphan (Achileas Skevis) living on the streets, Alexander finds a greater, redemptive purpose through the literal exchange of words—poetry and communication—and is able to transcend the corporeal bounds of his unfinished existence.

The three evocative words received by Alexander from the Albanian boy during the course of their journey capture the film's nostalgic and contemplative tone. The first is 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 that reflects his occupational distraction and estrangement from his family. The third is argathini, meaning 'very late at night', a word akin to the metaphoric 'twilight' of one's existence. Inevitably, the words express the poetic essence of Angelopoulos' indelible cinema as well: the soul of the Greek village, the sentiment of perpetual exile, and the dying of a culture.

At the 1998 Cannes Film Festival, during which Angelopoulos received the coveted Palme d'Or for Eternity and a Day, the filmmaker remarked, "I belong to a generation slowly coming to the end of our careers". (9) Nevertheless, despite his seemingly resigned statement, he continues to work diligently at his craft, having begun filming the first installment of an ambitious, large-scale romantic trilogy on the star-crossed destiny of two people from Odessa during the early part of the 20th century. The century-spanning, international three-part epic—the latest chapter in Angelopoulos' evolving, 'work in progress' oeuvre—is scheduled for completion in 2004.


Dan Fainaru. "…And About All the Rest" (1999), Theo Angelopoulos Interviews, Mississippi, University Press of Mississippi, 2001, p. 135

Fainaru, p. 125

Angelopoulos attributes his dismissal from IDHEC to a personal conflict with an instructor who disapproved of his perceived overconfident and cavalier attitude after his projects received overwhelming praise from both faculty and students.

Andrew Horton, The Films of Theo Angelopoulos: A Cinema of Contemplation, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1999, pp. 97–98

Although filmed between The Travelling Players and Alexander the Great, The Hunters is episodically considered as an epilogue to the historical trilogy.

Angelopoulos makes a distinction between the fact-based Macedonian historical figure, Alexander the Great and the mythically evolved, folkloric Greek hero, Megalexandros, who is depicted in traditional Karaghiozis shadow puppet theater as a larger-than-life, Christ-like figure.

Gabrielle Schulz, "I Shoot the Way That I Breathe: Eternity and a Day", reprinted in Dan Fainaru (ed.), Theo Angelopoulos Interviews, Mississippi, University Press of Mississippi, 2001, p. 117

Schulz, p. 117

Joan Dupont, "A Golden Ray in Theo Angelopoulos' Winter", The International Herald Tribune, May 26, 1988, p. 20


Anaparastassi, 1970
[Reconstruction]

An off-camera narrator (Theo Angelopoulos) provides the sobering demographics of an ancient village in northern Greece - a population that dwindled from 1,250 people based on a 1939 census to 85 in 1965 - as a passenger bus traverses the remote, mountainous region on an unpaved road and becomes stuck in a water-logged ditch, requiring the few occupants onboard to exit the public transportation and collaborate in throwing assorted rocks and debris into the shallow pool in order to provide traction for the vehicle. An unidentified man (Thanos Grammenos) arrives at the rural town and makes his way through the desolate streets before entering a modest home where he attempts to engage a reticent girl in polite conversation. The apparent stranger then steps outside in order to embrace a woman and her children as they approach the front yard. An estranged introduction by the woman, his wife Eleni (Toula Stathopoulou) to the young girl inside the house reveals that the man is the girl's father, Costas, who has been away as a guest worker in Germany. The film then freezes to a shot of the reunited family sitting at the dinner table for a meal as the film credits are displayed on screen - an idyllic and hopeful image that soon evaporates with the subsequent episode of the police fact-finding investigation into his death, presumably at the hands of his adulterous wife and her married lover (Yennis Totsicas). Proceeding achronologically and interweaving interviews conducted by an eager news crew (with the reporter played by Angelopoulos) sent into the quiet town in order to follow the breaking news story, the film presents the seemingly mundane events surrounding the death of the returning guest worker and in the process, presents a bleak portrait of the gradual extinction of the Greek village.

Shot in spare and austere, high contrast black and white, Theo Angelopoulos' appropriately titled first feature film, Reconstruction, is a haunting and incisive chronicle of the endemic depopulation of Greek rural villages during the mid twentieth century that, as the filmmaker would subsequently explore throughout his career, profoundly contributed to the increasing global irrelevance - the 'dying' - of Greek culture towards the end of the century. Based on a real-life village incident and shot during the politically restrictive rule of the military junta, the film's elliptical (if not deliberately evasive) and non-sequential narrative structure conveys a sense of alienation and non-resolution to the unconscionable tragedy that, in turn, illustrates the nation's estrangement from its own native cultural heritage through years of devastating wars (World War II and the subsequent Civil War), political unrest, and economic destabilization that contributed to the mass exodus of the population - usually working-age men - searching for employment opportunities and a better life in larger cities (primarily, to the more cosmopolitan Athens) or as overseas guest workers (note the contrast in perception through the inhumane treatment of Yorgos by aimless, xenophobic tenants in R.W. Fassbinder's Katzelmacher). The film-within-a-film structure that is visually repeated in the shots of Costas arriving home near the beginning and end of the film further reinforces the modern day reality of the inescapable, destructive cycles of migration and familial dissolution that continue to erode Greek identity and village life. By paralleling the geographic and moral desolation of a neglected and abandoned wife with the plight of an ancestral rural village, Angelopoulos reflects the contemporary national trauma of cultural uprooting and suppression of collective history.




O Thiassos, 1975
[The Travelling Players]
A weary, expressionless acting troupe arrives at a near empty train station in a rural Greek village. The itinerant actors have arrived into town to perform a popular, idyllic, pastoral play entitled Golpho The Shepherdess. The actors seem indistinguishable from each other, and only their literary names, derived from the Aeschylus Oresteia trilogy (Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, The Eumenides), provide a glimpse into their true character: the father, Agamemnon (Stratos Pachis); the adulterous mother, Clytamnestra (Aliki Georgouli); the traitorous uncle, Aegisthus (Vangelis Kazan); the avenging daughter, Elektra (Eva Kotamanidou); the revolutionary son, Orestes (Petros Zarkadis); and the self-involved daughter, Chrisothemis (Maria Vasileiou). The Travelling Players chronicles the turbulent recent history of Greece, from the Nazi occupation of World War II to the devastating Civil War between the Royalists and the Communists. Throughout the film, the troupe inexhaustibly attempts to perform the same play from village to village, only to be invariably disrupted by air raids, arrests, gunfire, and murder. Even their attempts to reach the next town often prove to be daunting as they encounter the bodies of executed rebels, are detained by supercilious Allied soldiers seeking entertainment, or are terrorized by their own countrymen searching for partisan rebels hiding in the mountains. Figuratively, the travelling players are transient, anonymous supporting players in their nation's own unresolved history - refugees within their own decimated country - eternally doomed to wander aimlessly through the austere and turbulent landscape, unable to go home again.

Theo Angelopoulos creates a harsh, bleak, and profoundly tragic portrait of the dissolution of the national soul in The Travelling Players. Angelopoulos frames the characters through medium and long shots in order to create a distant camera perspective, and reflects their own insignificance in their reluctant roles as peripheral witnesses to the country's turmoil. The unemotive, Byzantine countenance of the actors, similar to the muted expressions of the characters in Robert Bresson's films, further manifest, not only the ravaged, desolate villages of the Greek countryside, but also the emotional toll of the unending violence. The lyrics of a repeated ballad echoes the hopelessness and melancholy of the wandering players: "You will come back, no matter how many years go by, you will come back, full of remorse, to ask forgiveness, one night in shame you will come back". It is an elegy that mourns the loss of a great love, and solemnly awaits the return of a broken soul despite the ravages of time - a haunting, passionate serenade for a wounded nation still attempting to reconcile with its devastating, self-destructive past.


Taxidi sta Kithira, 1984
[Voyage to Cythera]

A pensive, middle-aged filmmaker named Alexander (Giulio Brogi, but whose voice was dubbed in Greek by Theo Angelopoulos) on a shooting break from the filming of a semi-autobiographical feature that explores the plight of returning political refugees during the general amnesty of the 1970s, encounters a gaunt, yet ennobled old man selling lavender at a kafeneon (a village cafeteria and lounge). Captivated by the humble vendor who perhaps bears a resemblance to his own absent father, Alexander follows the old man into the mist. Does Alexander, the abandoned son, believe this man to be his father, or does he, the director, envision this frail elder to be the ideal embodiment of the aging partisan (a part that he has been unable to cast) for his film? Reality becomes obscured in the metaphor of the enveloping fog. Soon, the old man, Spyros (Manos Katrakis) emerges from the harbor carrying his meager possessions - a suitcase and a violin - having returned home on a temporary visa after a 32-year exile in Uzbekistan. Politely but disaffectedly acknowledged by his adult children Alexander and Voula (Mary Chronopoulou), he is accompanied to see their mother, Katerina (Dora Volanaki), a nurturing woman who greets him with the simple yet poignant words, "Have you eaten?". Nevertheless, despite Katerina's tempered welcome, Spyros' homecoming invariably proves to be overwhelming as well-intentioned relatives, now virtual strangers, amass at the house for the eagerly awaited reunion. In an attempt to help him readjust to his 'new' life, the family decides to travel to their neglected, rural home in a near-deserted village in order to reconnect Spyros with familiar images from his past. Communicating through a series of coded, bird call-like whistles, Spyros reunites with an old family friend named Panayiotis (Giorgos Nezos) at a graveyard populated by fallen contemporaries. It is a bittersweet reconciliation between two aging neighbors - once divided by the devastating civil war - that momentarily brings a sense of closure to the melancholic and emotionally burdened Spyros. However, when Spyros discovers that the village is in the process of being acquired by commercial developers for a proposed resort, his refusal to participate in the sale of the land reopens the town's unhealed wounds towards the defiant and unapologetic rebel.

The first film of Theo Angelopoulos' self-described Trilogy of Silence (that also includes The Beekeeper and Landscape in the Mist), Voyage to Cythera is a sublimely poetic, elegiac, and profoundly moving portrait of disconnection, aging, and obsolescence. Using a film-within-a-film structure, Angelopoulos interweaves personal observation and historical account into a compelling testament on the tragic legacy of the Greek civil war. Through Angelopoulos' alter-ego, Alexander's dual role as film director and Spyros' son (who, in an oblique sense, may not be 'acting' in a fictionalized film), Angelopoulos correlates the abandonment, decay, and ruin of the Greek village witnessed by Spyros and his family with the subsequent apathy, callousness, and moral erosion of contemporary society encountered by Alexander as he attempts to find humanity and compassion for the uncertain plight of his disenfranchised and literally adrift father. Angelopoulos further illustrates the underlying hypocrisy of Spyros' persecution as a forcibly uprooted and marginalized national (who is essentially stripped of his citizenship and reduced to refugee status in his own country) struggling to retain the spirit of a dying culture, even as the community is eager to collective sell its ancestral homeland - its figurative national soul - and move away. Caught in an absurd, existential limbo of bureaucracy and emotional desolation, Spyros' interminable journey home, like the mythical voyage to Cythera, becomes one of human faith, connection, perseverance, and dignity.



O Melissokomos, 1986
[The Beekeeper]

The Beekeeper opens to a static shot of an extended dinner table festively covered with a white tablecloth and ornamented with rose petals that is sitting empty at the center of the courtyard in the rain, as the sound of Spyros' (Marcello Mastroianni) affectionate voice is heard recounting to his young daughter the natural selection process of bees that culminates in the majestic queen's dance. The guests have retreated indoors for what is revealed to be the wedding reception of Spyros' daughter - now a grown woman - in the family home. From the onset, the middle-aged schoolteacher's profound disconnection is immediately palpable as he shares a prolonged, uncomfortable silence with his wife (Jenny Roussea) while picking up shards of broken glass from an overturned tray of wine glasses. Dispirited by his inevitable separation from his beloved daughter, Spyros separates from his wife and embarks on his forefathers' traditional vocation of apiculture. Traveling southward with his bees on an instinctual springtime migration, Spyros encounters a young hitchhiker (Nadia Mourouzi) who, abandoned on a rural truck stop, insinuates herself on the resigned and acquiescent Spyros through intermittent points on his indeterminate journey. Estranged from an unfamiliar modern world where his generation has become a historically incidental relic, Spyros attempts to reconnect with humanity through the promiscuous and rootless young woman and, in the process, retreats further into the solitude of his dying avocation.

The Beekeeper is a haunting, compassionate, and profoundly melancholic portrait of isolation, dislocation, estrangement, and obsolescence. Using episodically contrasting imagery of union and separation, Theo Angelopoulos provides a sustained visual metaphor for the film's pervasive themes of fracture and disintegration: the assembly of family members for a formal wedding photograph that is followed by their individual departure from the family home, first by the daughter and her new husband, then the wife and son, and finally, Spyros; the opening sequence of the extended dinner table that is representationally shown in fragmented form through repeated shots of empty bistro tables as Spyros re-encounters the hitchhiker; the image of shattered wine glasses that is repeated in Spyros' impulsive crashing of his vehicle into a restaurant plate window in order to reunite with the young woman; the organized matrix of apiculture boxes during transit that is subsequently shown as individual containers randomly scattered along a hillside open field (that provides visual continuity with the overlooking houses of a distant village). Achieving a visual dichotomy that is both patternistic and deconstructive, the film serves as an indelible chronicle of the destruction of tradition and family, the cultural erosion of contemporary Greek society, and the desolation of the human soul.


Topio stin omichli, 1988
[Landscape in the Mist]

"In the beginning was the darkness. And then there was light..." Every evening, Voula (Tania Palaiologou) begins to tell her younger brother, Alexander (Michalis Zeke), the same bedtime tale - the story of creation - and is invariably interrupted by the approach of their distant mother as she momentary peers through the door to ensure that they have fallen asleep. It is an appropriate preface for the children's own unresolved story of their origin, as they attempt to unravel the mystery of their father's identity. Each day, they walk to the train station and attempt to stow away on a German-bound train to reunite with their unknown father who, their mother explains, lives in Germany. The children compose letters to their absent father in their thoughts, and await his response in their dreams. Alexander believes that their long-awaited reunion is near, and one day, the children succeed in boarding the train. However, they are soon discovered by the train conductor and turned over to the police. Fearing their premature return, Voula explains that they are visiting their uncle (Dimitris Kaberidis), and the police escort the children in order to see him. The uncle refuses to take custody of them, explaining that the children were born out of wedlock, and that their mother caused their flight by inventing the idea of the nonexistent father in Germany as a means of giving them false hope. Voula refuses to accept her uncle's explanation and, when the opportunity presents itself, runs away with Alexander from the police station. While travelling on an empty stretch of road, they encounter a cheerful, young itinerant actor named Orestes (Stratos Tzortzoglou) whose family members, intriguingly, are the same world weary actors attempting to perform (albeit, still unsuccessfully) Golpho the Shepherdess in The Travelling Players. Orestes is leaving for the military, but has grown fond of the children, and has decided to spend his final hours helping them reach the border town of Thessaloniki. But as the children continue on their misguided and unattainable quest, can they find redemptive meaning beyond their fruitless journey?

Landscape in the Mist is a poignant, lyrical, and allegorical fable on the human struggle for identity and connection. By revisiting the itinerant acting family of The Travelling Players, Theo Angelopoulos expounds on the transient, yet cyclical process of life as the common, universal bridge of human experience: the image of a dying horse on the snow (reminiscent of Robert Bresson's Au Hasard Balthazar) juxtaposed against a wedding celebration; Orestes' departure from his family vocation to join the military, the odd image of a large statue hand rising from the sea that metaphorically connects the cultural legacy of ancient Greek civilization to contemporary Greece. Like the symbolic, disembodied sculptured hand, the children, too, are incomplete - severed from their heritage by being denied a relationship with their father. And like the struggling travelling players, the children have embarked on a endless journey from which there is no return. However, in their struggle to overcome the artificially created borders (a theme similarly explored by Andrei Tarkovsky) that separate them from their elusive German father, the children find their own path to closure and personal reconciliation. In the haunting, surreal final scene, the children embrace a surrogate connection to their ancestral history - a universal icon that binds all humanity towards a shared purpose of survival and continuity - an enduring symbol of nature and life.


Mia Aiwniothta Kai Mia Mera, 1998
[Eternity and a Day]
Alexandre (Bruno Ganz) has reluctantly dismissed his devoted housekeeper, Urania (Helene Gerasimidou), explaining that he is about to embark on a "long journey" from which he does not intend to return. It is a vague euphemism that allows him to say good-bye to his loved ones without the sentimentality of revelation. The reality is that he is terminally ill, and the doctor has advised him to go to the hospital when the pain becomes unbearable. Tomorrow is the fateful day - the beginning of the end - and all that is left for Alexandre is to get through this final day. He pays an unexpected visit to his daughter, Katerina (Iris Chatziantoniou), who asks about his one literary obsession. He has lived a long and prosperous life of a renowned poet and writer, but has been consumed by one project since his wife, Anna's (Isabelle Renauld), death: to complete an unfinished poem entitled The Besieged Free by a nineteenth century immigrant poet named Solomos. Alexandre hands Katerina a collection of unopened letters belonging to his late wife. Among them is a letter without an envelope - a poignant, affectionate disclosure of love and longing written by a young wife to her distracted, work-obsessed husband. Alexandre momentarily finds himself returning to the memories of his past - to an idyllic summer day that never was - to a perfect day with his beloved Anna and their new daughter. But the images are fleeting, and Alexandre is left with a more pressing matter at hand: to find a new home for his dog. He unwittingly interrupts a wedding ceremony in order to ask Urania to care for the dog. Urania urges him to take her with him on his "trip", but he declines. Death is, after all, a solitary journey. While waiting for his prescription to be filled at a local pharmacy, he sees a young Albanian window washer (Achileas Skevis) abducted into a van. Alexandre rescues the boy, and resolves to take him back to his war-torn homeland. In the process of attending to the welfare of the young refugee, he reconciles with the guilt and regret of his selfish past and learns to accept his fate.

Theo Angelopoulos creates a stunningly haunting, seamless fusion of reality, nostalgia, and dreams in Eternity and a Day. Using long takes and reverse tracking, Angelopoulos creates a visual metaphor for the isolation of the soul: the hallway shot of Alexandre after Urania's departure; a team of window washers descending on cars at a stop light; the framed shot of Anna by the gate of the summer house. Moreover, recurrent images of abandoned buildings, repeated flights of Albanian refugees across the border, and the unfinished poem, reflect Alexandre's regret over his own unresolved actions. Figuratively, Alexandre, too, is an exile - longing to recapture an irretrievable past - unable to return home.