Theodoros Angelopoulos Films | Theodoros Angelopoulos Filmography | Theodoros Angelopoulos Biography | Theodoros Angelopoulos Career | Theodoros Angelopoulos Awards

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. A judge tries to reconstruct the circumstances of the murder, but finds himself unable to communicate with the accused, who belong to a totally different culture. To shoot this Pirandellian story of misunderstanding, Angelopoulos adopted an austere style featuring long camera movements that show a bleak and desolate Greek landscape far removed from the tourist leaflets. Reminiscent of Visconti's Ossessione, this is a film noir that opens the way to more daring aesthetic ventures.

Angelopoulos's trilogy of Days of '36, The Travelling Players, and The Hunters can be seen as an exploration of contemporary Greek history. If his style shows some influences?particularly Jancs?'s one reel-one take methodology and Antonioni's slow, meditative mood?Angelopoulos has nevertheless created an authentic epic cinema akin to Brecht's theatre in which aesthetic emotion is counterbalanced by a reflexive approach that questions the surfaces of reality. The audience is not allowed to identify with a central character, nor to follow a dramatic development, nor given a reassuring morality. The director boldly goes from the present to the past within the same shot, and in The Hunters broadens his investigation by including the fantasies of his characters. The sweep of a movie like Travelling Players, which includes songs and dances, is breathtaking. Its tale of an actors group circulating through Greece from 1939 to 1952 performing a pastoral play is transformed into a four-hour earth odyssey.

Angelopoulos's masterpiece was preceded by the haunting Days of '36. This political thriller about a murder in a prison proved a prelude to events of national importance. It is the director's most radical use of off-screen space and off-screen sound, of the dialectic between the seen and the unseen. With its closed doors, whispering voices in corridors, and silhouettes running to and fro, it evokes the mystery that surrounds the exercise of power.

Angelopoulos's fifth film, Alexander the Great, breaks new ground: it deals with myth and develops the exploration of the popular unconscious already present in Travelling Players and The Hunters. At the turn of the twentieth century, a bandit is seen as the reincarnation of the Macedonian king. He kidnaps some English residents in Greece and leads them to the mountains. The kidnapper tries to blackmail the British government but ends up killing his hostages. Angelopoulos opposes several groups: the foreigners, the outlaws, some Italian anarchists who have taken refuge in Greece, and village people who try to establish a Utopian community. The director's indictment of hero-worship and his portrayal of diverse forms of political failure reveal a growing pessimism in his works. But his style is as masterful as ever, reaching a kind of austere grandeur reminiscent of Byzantine mosaics. Few have blended political investigation with a search for new forms of expression with such satisfying results.?MICHEL CIMENT