Theodoros Angelopoulos's considerable achievements in cinema during the 1970s and 1980s have made him not only the most important Greek filmmaker to date, but one of the truly creative and original artists of his time. In 1970 he convinced producer George Papalios to finance his first film, Anaparastassi. The story follows the pattern of a crime tale ? la James Cain. A Greek peasant is killed by his wife and her lover on his return from Germany, where he had gone to find work.
Antonioni's cinema is one of non-identification and displacement. In almost all of his films shots can be found striking emphasis on visual structure that works in opposition to the spectator's desire to identify, as in classical Hollywood cinema, with either a protagonist's existential situation or with anything like a seamless narrative continuity?the ?impression of reality? so often evoked in conjunction with the effect of fiction films on the spectator.
Francis Ford Coppola became the first major American film director to emerge from a university degree program in filmmaking. He received his Master of Cinema degree from UCLA in 1968, after submitting his first film of consequence, You're a Big Boy Now (1967), a freewheeling comedy about a young man on the brink of manhood, to the university as his master's thesis.
In the late 1970s, when the conflict between the State and the citizens of Poland was imminent, a new trend emerged in cinematography?the ?cinema of moral unrest.? All the films in this trend have one common denominator: an unusually cutting critical view of the state of the society and its morals, human relationships in the work process, public and private life. It is more than logical that Krzysztof Kieslowski would have belonged to this trend; he had long been concerned with the moral problems of the society, and paid attention to them throughout his film career with increasing urgency.
