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This chapter studies the theme of katabasis in two recent films by the Greek film director, Theo Angelopoulos — Ulysses' Gaze and Eternity and One Day. Developing previous work, the chapter argues that Angelopoulos does not simply approach Homer through the Western literary tradition, but that he develops a filmic idiom of repeated typical scenes and formulas that closely resembles the traditional language of Homer.

This chapter examines the development of what it calls the ‘narrative imperative’ in Theo Angelopoulos' films such as Eternity and a Day, Megalexandros and Ulysses' Gaze. Throughout Angelopoulos' career as a filmmaker, the place and nature of literary references progressively superseded references to other forms of the ancient Greek artistic heritage and contributed to establishing a progressive drive towards a narrative imperative in his creative process. This imperative in Angelopoulos' most recent films consists in subjecting the function and signification of images, mise en scène, even music, to the advancement of the plot, the characterisation of its protagonists and the construction of a diegetic world. The chapter argues that the narrative imperative in Angelopoulos' modernist cinema is a driving force behind the numerous explicit references to Greek tragedy and Homeric epic.

This chapter analyses Theo Angelopoulos' 1984 film Voyage to Cythera, arguing that it ‘constitutes a creative hinge in Angelopoulos' career’, whereby an individuating and ultimately humanising ‘recalibration of creative effort applied as much to the characters in his films as it did to himself, as the director of the films' characters’. Employing Voyage to Cythera as a starting point, the chapter explores two interrelated concepts and two interlocking mental functions — syncope and fractal liminality. It considers how Voyage to Cythera condenses within its intricate filmic texture Angelopoulos' key paradigm of the ‘boundary phenomenon’. It shows that Angelopoulos' borders can be more accurately represented as ‘fractal liminalities’ — endlessly self-duplicating, transitional lines of separation between parts of an organic entity, or between stages of an ongoing journey, which cannot be located and drawn with any degree of certainty.

This chapter examines Theo Angelopoulos' work as a film critic, focusing on the ways in which he was invested in cinema — personally, professionally, intellectually and aesthetically — even before stepping into the role of filmmaker. The time frame of Angelopoulos' critical activity is particularly intriguing since the 1960s were the formative years of New Greek Cinema. The chapter considers Angelopoulos' film criticism for the newspaper Democratic Change during the turbulent but creative pre-dictatorship 1960s. It explores unknown aspects of Angelopoulos' cinéphile background and how his criticism relates to his eventual ideas on cinema and filmmaking practices. It also discusses Angelopoulos' introduction of auteur theory in his very first review, how he was influenced by fellow filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, the importance of form and temporality in his work, his interest in film performance and sound, and his discourse on Greek national cinema.

This afterword offers the first critical account of Theo Angelopoulos' final, unfinished film, The Other Sea, describing it as the capstone to a long career and arguing that it would have synthesised many of the lifelong concerns and stylistic singularities that defined Angelopoulos' modernist cinema. The Other Sea was to be Angelopoulos' concluding film for the trilogy that began with The Weeping Meadow (2003) and continued with The Dust of Time (2008), but production stopped due to Angelopoulos' untimely death. Here the author shares both the nature of this unfinished odyssey and his personal experience with this tragically interrupted project. He first emphasises the importance of ‘unfinished’ and ‘interrupted’ to Angelopoulos' filmmaking before discussing The Other Sea's screenplay and production. He concludes by asking whether The Other Sea will be completed as a film.

This book examines the oeuvre of Theo Angelopoulos, whose films are deeply immersed in the historical experiences of his homeland, Greece, while the international appeal of his work can be attributed to his firm commitment to modernism as a formal response to the crises and failures of world history in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It considers some of the main themes in Angelopoulos' filmography, including the crisis of representation and the force of mediation; the question of representing history and how to come to terms with the past; the failures of the utopian aspirations of the twentieth century; issues of forced political or economic migration and exile; and the persistence of history in a supposedly post-historical present. This introduction discusses the lack of critical attention that Angelopoulos' cinema has received in the Anglophone scholarship and provides a historical overview of Angelopoulos' modernist cinema. It also summarises the individual chapters that follow.

This chapter situates Theo Angelopoulos within the compositional context of European post-war cinematic modernism, and more specifically in relation to fellow filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni. Antonioni's early 1960s cinema has long been recognised as one of the key influences on Angelopoulos' filmmaking. Angelopoulos himself has described Antonioni's L'avventura (1960) as a seminal moment in his development, reportedly watching it thirteen times while a student in Paris during the early 1960s. The chapter examines the complex development of European modernist cinema in the postwar period through the work of Angelopoulos and Antonioni. The chapter shows that Angelopoulos' films present time and history in the form of a co-present or multi-layered textuality. It also considers reflexivity, composition and the gaze in the films of Angelopoulos and Antonioni before concluding with a discussion of Angelopoulos' films in relation to modernity.

This chapter examines the ways that Theo Angelopoulos forged a cinema of demystification, whose individual films ‘contested history as the justifying discourse of power and authority’. Angelopoulos' trilogy of History includes Days of '36, The Travelling Players, and The Hunters. This trilogy is one of the most radical ‘political’ interventions attempted within the established visual poetics of World Cinema. Both historically and culturally, these films were produced at the beginning and the end of a period of extreme experimentation with visual representation, becoming in their own distinct ways meditations on the limits of representability, on the function of cinematic images, and on the visualisation of collective memory. The chapter offers a reading of Angelopoulos' historical trilogy and shows that all three films articulated an integrated vision of how structures and institutions work together to deprive contemporary citizens of their agency and self-determination.

This chapter examines the transition between the ‘politics’ of Theo Angelopoulos' early films and the ‘humanism’ of his later work. Commentators such as David Bordwell and Fredric Jameson have accounted for this change of direction in Angelopoulos' films. Bordwell, for example, notes the shift from a first political phase to one that is more inspired by an existential humanism. Angelopoulos himself declares that after Marxism and Brechtian methods had had their day, he turned to something grounded in humanism and existentialism. The chapter considers Gilles Deleuze's concept of the ‘time-image’ and how it provides a means of distinguishing between two aesthetic modalities by way of their articulations of the past, of time and of memory. It argues that the key distinction is between what Deleuze calls a ‘recollection-image’, and that which he terms ‘pure recollection’. While Angelopoulos' early films are constructed by way of recollection-images, his later films offer pure recollection.

This chapter presents two essays whose author offers a unique perspective on Theo Angelopoulos, approaching his work from the standpoint of a contemporary auteur and directorial colleague. The first essay reflects upon several meetings with Angelopoulos while the second provides a filmmaker's appraisal of Angelopoulos' technical accomplishments. The author tentatively attributes his friendship with Angelopoulos ‘to the similarity in approach we feel our films take, but it is also thanks to Theo's love for talking. Or, we could even say love for giving speeches’. He also comments on two of Angelopoulos' films, The Hunters and The Travelling Players, arguing that the latter showcases the director's filmmaking and camerawork. He describes Angelopoulos' camerawork as one of lingering affection and the camerawork of hope.

This chapter examines how, in Ulysses' Gaze, Theo Angelopoulos strives to combine history, myth, and politics in ways that constitute a cinema of historical experience, collective memory, and ethics. Angelopoulos' films have been praised for their historical ambition, political themes and explorations of memory, as well as for their commitment to cinematic modernism. For some critics, like David Bordwell, Angelopoulos is a late modernist auteur whose ‘anachronistic’ cinematic style bears the hallmarks of 1960s and 1970s ‘political modernism’. For others, like Fredric Jameson, Angelopoulos' work is best understood as hybrid or transitional. The chapter considers how Angelopoulos' aesthetic style expresses historical experience and cultural memory and argues that Angelopoulos' methods as a filmmaker are paradigmatically modernist.

This chapter examines the role of collective narrative in Theo Angelopoulos' films from the 1970s. It begins with the premise that ‘our failure to grant Theo Angelopoulos the position he deserves in modern cinema’ stems from the fact that modern Greek history remains ‘far less familiar than that of the Western European countries’. It argues that ‘Greece has gone through a collective experience of which most other modern nations have only known bits and pieces’, and considers some of the ways that Angelopoulos depicts this experience as a kind of modern epic. The chapter analyses some of Angelopoulos' first films, including The Travelling Players, Reconstruction and The Hunters.

This chapter analyses Theo Angelopoulos' 1980 film Megalexandros (or Alexander the Great), which was released in 1980 and which is generally considered to emblematise a moment of political disenchantment for the director. Megalexandros seeks to join history, myth and current events seamlessly with a healthy disrespect for all things that represent authoritarianism. In confronting the shortcomings of the contemporary Greek popular movement, the film stood alone in the New Greek Cinema. The chapter first considers critical and popular reactions to Megalexandros before discussing the film within the context of the handful of works that examine anti-authoritarian revolutionary strategies. It also looks at Angelopoulos' views on the question of Greek national identity and argues that Megalexandros is an expression of political transition, in which Angelopoulos' sympathies shifted from state socialism and party politics to anarchism or anarchocommunism.

This chapter discusses the ‘post’ as a historical, geopolitical, and cultural terminus that points towards a ‘beyond’. It examines two films, Theo Angelopoulos's Ulysses' Gaze (1995) and Samira Makhmalbaf's Blackboards (2000), in which the discourses and sensibilities that inform modern subjectivity, notions of agency, epistemologies of cinematic movement and mobile vision, fantasies of complete knowledge and control, and the pleasures of journeys of exploration, discovery and revelation, all have either completed and concluded their historical trajectories or are irrelevant within a referential context that involves different configurations of the subject and mobility. The chapter shows that Ulysses' Gaze obliterates the subject and object of the spatial exploration that the film undertakes, while the textual practices of Blackboards turn their back on dialectics articulating different types of mobile vision and subjectivity.

This chapter examines the work of Bertolt Brecht as a source of formative energy for Theo Angelopoulos. It reads Angelopoulos' 1970s films with an eye for Brechtian forms and tropes, focusing specifically on the Brechtian concept of Gestus and its application within the filmic medium. The chapter first considers Brecht's insistence that film should be seen like a a series of tableaux, which do not produce ‘wirkenden Handlung’ (plot development), but have a sense of autonomy. It then explains how Angelopoulos' cinema bridges the early and the late period of cinematic modernism, how he thematises the act of representation in his films, and his employment of a recurring theme in modernist cinema: the ‘circular trajectory’. It also analyses the Fabel, or collective narrative, in Angelopoulos' historical tetralogy (Days of '36, The Travelling Players, and Megalexandros).

This chapter examines the idea of recollection by focusing on Theo Angelopoulos' 1995 film Ulysses' Gaze, arguing that cultural memory creates virtual spaces in which ‘different temporalities’ are brought together and ‘experienced simultaneously’. Drawing on Jacques Derrida's concept of ‘archive fever’, it considers this aspect of cultural memory in Ulysses' Gaze and shows that the film compulsively returns to its historical antecedents, but in doing so it confronts the countervailing logic: that ‘the archive never fully yields its secrets’. Through the aesthetic tropes and complex ideological vision that have become the trademarks of Angelopoulos' cinematography, Ulysses' Gaze dramatises not only that the history embodied in cultural archives must be heard in the plural but also that the imperative to remember and who — as well as how one — remembers must be seen as the result of complex discursive forces.

This chapter examines one of Theo Angelopoulos' technical signatures, ‘the long-take circular or semi-circular pan in long shot, stretching from between 180 degrees and 720 degrees’, describing it ‘as the great auteur's most distinctive device for dynamic group framing’. It considers Angelopoulos' early contributions to the project of a collectivist cinema for those signature formal effects that make his work truly distinctive in order to delineate some aesthetic-political limits to his cinematography of the group, which may therefore have forced him by a mounting aesthetic logic — as well as a geopolitical one — to transfer to a more ‘subjectivist’ approach in his later films. It argues that when Angelopoulos uses panning shots in films such as Megalexandros and Landscape in the Mist, he is deploying ‘cinema's most trenchant shorthand for the totality as such: a camera movement whose logic is not self-regarding but self-effacing…’.

This chapter examines Theo Angelopoulos' last film The Dust of Time (2008), describing it as an apotheosis to the director's visual investment in duration. In The Dust of Time, a voice-over declares that ‘nothing ever ends’. The dust of time is the obliviousness of history. It would seem that the temporality of history is couched in opacity, whereas the work of memory struggles to bring a sense of lucidity to the past, to past experience and, finally, to the experience of the past in the present. The chapter considers The Dust of Time's consistent foregrounding of duration as both aesthetic effect and experiential mode, and how Angelopoulos' films in general encapsulate both these senses of temporal duration: that is, as a phenomenon intimately connected with the nature of the moving image and, secondly, as the more thematic and philosophical notion that ‘nothing ever ends’.

This chapter examines how Theo Angelopoulos' late style mediates a political response to the ascent of neoliberalism in Europe and especially in Greece. Angelopoulos' shift from one aesthetic mode to another might be a kind of exilic disavowal, but it is not problematic or complicating or alienated in and of itself. To be sure, art cinema's will to an ostensibly humanist aestheticism provides a point of entry into thinking how compositional beauty can in fact be political. The chapter offers a reading of The Dust of Time, describing it as a work of late style not only because it articulates within a different and seemingly reactive aesthetic to the earlier films, but also because this new aesthetic remains disjointed. It situates the actual problems in the film within Angelopoulos' evolving aesthetic and within their historical context, and highlights the peculiar relationship between form and history in this work.