The Last Modernist: The Films of Theo Angelopoulos

Tbe Last Modernist The Films of Theo Angelopoulos

cinema voices Series editor: Matthew Stevens, FUCKS BOOKS Series consultant: Brian Mcilroy, University of British Colu mbia This series provides critical assessments of film directors whose work is motivated by social, political or historical concerns, or reveals an opposition to conventional filmmaking systems and · structures. The following titles are published or in preparation: · Auteur/provocateur: the films of Denys Arcand Edited by Andre Loiselle and Brian Mcilroy ·

nark alchemy: the films of Jan Svankmajer

Edited by Peter Hames ·

Queen of the 'B's : Ida Lupine behind the camera

Edited by Annette Kuhn · By angels driven: the films of Derek Jarman Edited by Chris Lippard · Poet of civic courage: the films of Francesco Rosi Edited by Carlo Testa · A call to action : the films of Ousmane Sembene Edited by Sheila Petty · Agent of challenge and defiance: the films of Ken Leach Edited by George McKnight · The last modernist: the films of Theo Angelopoulos Edited by Andrew Horton Lucid dreams: the films of Krzysztof Kieslowski Edited by Paul Coates

Tbe Last Modernist

The Films of Theo Angelopoulos

Edited by Andrew Horton

cinema voices series

Fi FLICKS BOOKS

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 0-9489 1 1-74-3 (Hb) ISBN 0-9489 1 1 -79-4 (Pb)

First published in 1997 by Flicks Books 29 Bradford Road Trowbridge Wiltshire BA 14 9AN England tel +44 1 225 767728 fax +44 1225 7604i8

© individual contributors, 1997

An edition of this book is published in North and South America by Greenwood Press in hardback, and by Praeger Publishers in paperback.

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contents

Preface

vi

Introduction Andrew Horton

1

Modernism, minimalism, melancholy: Angelopoulos and visual style David Bordwell ll Angelopoulos, Greek history and Tbe Travelling Players Dan Georgakas

27

A tour of the graveyard of Greek ideals: Voyage to Cythera

Vasilis Rafalidis

43

Tessellations and honeycombs: Tbe Beekeeper Gerald O 'Grady

51

Theo Angelopoulos: landscapes, players, mist Michael Wilmington

57

The empire of the journey in Voyage to Cythera Yvette Biro

69

Theo Angelopoulos: the past as history, the future as form Fredric jameson

78

" What do our souls seek?": an interview with Theo Angelopoulos Andrew Horton 96 Theo Angelopoulos: filmography Compiled by Andrew Horton

111

Theo Angelopoulo s: selected bibliography Compiled by Matthew Stevens and Andrew Horton

116

Index

132

Notes on contributors

138

Preface

In 1995, in celebration of 1 00 years of cinema, a French-Spanish­ Swedish compilation film entitled Lumiere et compagnie (Lumiere and Company) was released. The concept was simple: 39 directors from around the world were asked to use one of the original Lumiere brothers cameras to shoot a piece of their choice that would be only 52 seconds long, the length of the first film made 1 00 years ago. It says much about the importance of Thea Angelopoulos to world cinema as the 20th century closes and the second century of filmmaking begins that he was given the honour of closing the film with his "shot" . He chose a shot he had made for his award-winning latest film, To Vlemma Tou Odyssea ( Ulysses' Gaze, 1 995), but which he had not finally chosen to use in his own film. It is a simulated black and white film from the beginning of the century of an actor playing Ulysses/Odysseus, and crawling out of the sea after his escape from Calypso's island. He stares into the camera and thus at us, across the 20th century, and a title card appears echoing Homer's line: "On what foreign shore have I landed?" Fade out on Lumiere and Company and on the first century of the magic of the motion picture. That provocative leap of vision and filmmaking that combines Homer and silent cinema at the end of the century is typical of this filmmaker in a Greek landscape, Thea Angelopoulos. This collection is dedicated to exploring his vision and accomplishment as we attempt to suggest what cinematic and cultural shores his films have landed upon.

vi

J1ltrOOUction Andrew. Horton

I.

The poet's journey on film

This collection of essays represents the first book in English to bring together an important diversity of critical voices focused on one of the world's most significant and distinctive film directors, Theo Angelopoulos. 1 As this volume makes clear, Angelopoulos' impact on cinema can be seen in four major areas: as an innovative film stylist (the essays by David Bordwell and Fredric Jameson pay particular attention to this aspect); as a committed filmmaker concerned with a cinematic representation of history (the essays by Dan Georgakas and Vasilis Rafalidis); as a Greek filmmaker attempting to represent a cross-section of Greek culture that has been either ignored or under­ represented in previous films set in Greece (most of the essays elaborate this dimension); and as a screen artist able to go beyond the limits of national cultures to evoke the ageless, the universal and the mythical, or, put simply, that which transcends history (essays by Biro and Wilmington). Taken together, these elements suggest a cinema of contemplation - that is, a cinema that points to an inner voyage or journey (essay by Gerald O'Grady), as Angelopoulos himself suggests in the interview with him in the final section of this collection. A cinema in the mist paradoxically suggests that Angelopoulos' cinema seeks for clarity beyond the mist that history and culture have woven during this century that is closing and, by extension, throughout time. Hailed by critics as a major auteur in Europe, including England, and also in Japan among many countries where his work has been known since 1 970, when his first feature film, A naparastasis (Reconstruction) , appeared, Angelopoulos nevertheless has remained practically unknown in the United States and many other English­ speaking countries. We hope that this anthology will help make Angelopoulos more accessible to those unfamiliar with his works. It is fortuitous also that these essays were brought together at a time when Angelopoulos has entered a new phase with his latest film, To Vlemma Tou Odyssea ( Ulysses' Gaze), the 1 995 Cannes Grand Jury prize-winne r, which is shot mainly in English and stars Harvey Keitel. For, even such a popular magazine as Time took note of this poetic

1

Greek filmmaker. In describing Ulysses' Gaze at the Cannes Film Festival, Richard Corliss noted that "[t]he intelligence behind the camera is matched by the aching humanity in front. Ulysses' Gaze surely deserved to win the Palme d'Or" _2 Any viewer will be struck by the immediacy of Angelopoulos' cinematic eye for composition of scenes and images (with his career-, long collaboration with cinematographer, Giorgos Arvanitis). But there also remains much in each of his ten features made since 1 970 that is quite "Greek", and thus only partially grasped by a non-Hellenic audience. Put another way, Angelopoulos has steadfastly resisted the methods and material of traditional Hollywood and European popular cinema in order to pursue his own vision of an austere yet rewarding cinema of contemplation, self-reflection and "reconstruction" of history, myth, culture and, ultimately, identity itself. These essays are dedicated to helping to contextualize and illuminate corners and strands, patterns, textures and themes that contribute to making his seemingly simple style yield such complex responses. Angelopoulos' cinema is very definitely a Greek cinema, for, as Dan Georgakas explains in his essay on 0 Tbiassos ( Tbe Travelling Players, 1 975) , the "larger theme" for Angelopoulos "is Greek national identity" . And that is exactly where the poet enters. For as Angelopoulos explains in the interview, poetry was his first love. Furthermore, he was particularly taken by the works of the Greek Nobel Prize-winning poet, George Seferis, and by those of T S Eliot, with whom Seferis has often been compared. One other poet has played an even greater role in Angelopoulos' career - Homer. Of course, these are not the only influences, as his interview suggests. But it is important to understand the nature of these poets in helping to shape Angelopoulos' approach to cinema, for their influence is perhaps even more significant than that of filmmakers who have meant a great deal to him, such as Welles, Ford, Dreyer, Ozu , Tarkovskij and, as David Bordwell so clearly explains, Antonioni. There is firstly the importance that the Greek tradition has always given to poetry. Aristotle said it well in Tbe Poetics when he described poetry as more important than history, for history merely states what happened while poetry concerns what was and is possible. And, of course, for the Greeks, Homer was their "Bible" and their encyclopedia: he was their culture. In more modern terms, the mood and focus of Angelopoulos' cinema parallel those of the poetry of Eliot and Seferis in depicting a decaying 20th century in which meaning, belief, individuality and culture appear fragmented, exhausted, discarded and disconnected. But these poets are also contemplative creators. This is a poetry that embraces the philosophical and the paradoxical, and thus the realm of the contemplative. It is no accident

2

that Seferis, the Greek poet whom Angelopoulos admires so much, is quite similar to Eliot in these respects. Seferis writes in his poem, "An Old Man on the River Bank": I want no more than to speak simply, to be granted this grace. Because we have burdened song with so much music that it is gradually sinking and we have adorned our art so much that its features have been eaten away by gold. and it is time to say our few words because tomorrow the soul sets sail.3 It is difficult to conceive of many filmmakers saying they are concerned in their films with the "soul" of their culture. But this is an apparent premise in so much of Angelopoulos' work, including his most recent film, Ulysses' Gaze, which begins with a quotation from Plato: "And the soul, if she is to know herself, must look into a soul" . The allusion is not merely to Plato, however, for the same line appears in Seferis' 24-part poem, "Mythical Story", which is constructed as a journey, much like that of Odysseus in the Odyssey, but set simultaneously in modern times and in a universal, mythical, timeless reality. Thus, in tone, style and content, Angelopoulos' cinema has exemplified the simplicity and unadorned art that Seferis calls for in his own poetry. Finally, similar to Seferis in much of his work, but particularly in "Mythical Story", Angelopoulos has cast his films as journeys. Angelopoulos is the cinematic poet searching not only for knowledge, but also for a kind of transcendence which "home" or Ithaca - Odysseus' longed-for goal - represents. II. The individual and the group A line of weary actors in threadbare coats stand clutching their suitcases outside a small-town train station during a cold winter morning in 1 939. They stand. They wait. They are silent. But, in voiceover, we hear the old accordion player, a member of these travelling players, say: "It was autumn, 1 939, and we had reached Aigion. We were tired. We had two days to rest. " With this scene, Theo Angelopoulos' third feature film, 7be Travelling Players, judged by many as one of the most important films ever made, ends. But the ending is really only the beginning. For this four-hour modern epic opens with the same shot in the same train station, except for the fact that the year is 1952. Thus, almost literally, Angelopoulos built into his cinematic evocation of Greek history from

3

1 939 to 1 952, mixed with Greek mythology and tragedy, an echo of one of his favourite poets, T S Eliot, who writes in "East Coker", "In my beginning is my end", a line that is quoted in his most recent film, Ulysses' Gaze. Similarly, we can say that Angelopoulos' films highlight both the individual and his or her relationship to a group or the Others. In this final shot of 7be Travelling Players, each actor - that is, each character - is completely his or her own individual. This is all the truer since we have followed the destinies of each throughout the film. However, we also sense them as a group, or sense that they are actors belonging to a troupe. But Angelopoulos goes against what we usually conceive to be an "individual" in his presentation of his characters. He uses the long shot when most directors would use a close-up; he shoots in long continuous takes, often with elaborate, slow tracking shots when most directors today would use a variation of swiftly edited shots (montage); he prefers a silent scene to one with dialogue; he chooses more often than not to have characters stand or sit completely motionless; and he presents us with such a minimal "story" that we cannot "get inside" the protagonists in a psychological sense as we do in most dramas and films that echo Aristotelian concerns for motivation, conflict and resolution. "I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope", is another line from Eliot's poem, and it could well be taken as Angelopoulos' guide to character presentation. As Fredric Jameson comments in an earlier version of his essay, the total effect of Angelopoulos' cinema is to "neutralize the categories of individualism and the individual body but also the individual character altogether" . It is this unique concept, Jameson argues, that makes Angelopoulos' early films particularly examples of "historical cinema", in which we experience "history" as a mixture of many forces in which the usual boundaries of fact and fiction, foreground and background, the individual and the group, interact and, finally, cease to have meaning as traditionally conceived. Thus, once more I suggest that Angelopoulos has steadfastly chosen to anchor his cinema not in motion, but in stillness, in an effort to have us experience and contemplate his images in a new way. In part, as Bordwell and Jameson make clear, this approach grows out of a "late modernism" (Jameson) or a special form of postmodernism. But only in part. For, ultimately, Angelopoulos' cinema is a cinema in a Greek landscape. His visual sense, for instance, owes as much to Byzantine iconography, in terms of a presentation and understanding of space, time and character, as to the modernist cinemas of Antonioni, Jancs6 and Ozu .

4

III. Angelopoulos' career Theo Angelopoulos was born in Athens in 1 93 6 . He is one of four children of Katerina and Spyros Angelopoulos, who himself was from a village in the Peloponnesian region of rural Greece. We should note that, as a "city boy" born of parents from the countryside, Angelopoulos is entirely typical of so many of his generation who were, in effect, first-generation urbanites with deep country roots. The difference, however, is that, while many Athenians have tried hard to forget or ignore their rural heritage, Angelopoulos has made a career­ long effort to explore it. He survived the hardships of the Second World War and the German Occupation, followed by the Greek Civil War 0 946-49), despite hunger and the political persecutions suffered by his father. He studied law at the University of Athens from 1 953 to 1 957, and then, after military service 0959-6 0), studied film and anthropology in Paris for the next few years, returning to Greece in 1 963 . Angelopoulos began working for a left-wing newspaper, Dimokratiki Allaghi, and began making short films in 1 9 66 . He finished E Ekpombi ( 1be Broadcast) in 1 968, and went on to make his first feature, Reconstruction, in 1970. The subject of the film was taken from a newspaper article about a village woman who murdered her husband after he returned from Germany, where he had been a guest worker for several years. Filmed in black and white for little money, in rural Greece near the Albanian border, and using non-professional actors, the film made it immediately clear that Angelopoulos was not following in the footsteps of commercial Greek cinema. Greek cinema flourished in the 1 950s and 1960s, focusing on two particular genres: light comedy and melodramas, centred usually around village characters who moved to the city in search of a better life - a narrative formula that reflected the changing demographics of the country itself, for, by 1 970, Athens had become a city of four million in a country with a total population of only eight million. Angelopoulos then completed a trilogy of films about Greek history from 1 93 6 to the late- 1970s: Meres Tou '36 (Days of'36, 1972), 1be Travelling Players 0975) and I Kinigi ( 1be Hunters, 1977). In all cases, as Georgakas points out in his essay, Angelopoulos portrayed an history viewed from the Left that Greeks had not seen onscreen befo re. 0 Megalexandros (Alexander the Great, 1 980) served as a postscript, or rather a prologue, to the historical trilogy, by focusing on Greek culture and history at lhe turn of the century, thus completing Angelopoulos' contemplation of the whole span of Greek history in the 20th century.

His next three features were dubbed by Angelopoulos as a "trilogy of silence". 4 Taxidi Sta Kithira ( Voyage to Cythera, 1983), as b oth Yvette Biro and Vasilis Rafalidis make clear, concerns th e contemporary echoes of the Greek Civil War, as an old Communist, Spyros, returns from exile in the Soviet Union to find that he no longer has a home. Similarly, the main figure in 0 Melissokomos (The Beekeeper, 1986), also named Spyros, is a retired schoolteacher who attempts to return to a home that has become anything but an Ithaca in the Homeric sense. Topio Stin Omichli (Landscape in the Mist, 1988) takes on the Odyssey theme, with a voyage from the viewpoint of two children, Voula, a young girl, and Alexander, her even younger brother. Their odyssey is in search of a father whom they have never known, and who most likely does not exist. Angelopoulos' most recent films could be considered as a "Balkan duo". In both To Meteoro Vima To Pelargou ( The Suspended Step of the Stork, 1991) and Ulysses' Gaze, he has turned his attention to the interrelatedness of Greece to its neighbouring Balkan nations, and to the whole concept of the Balkans, both as they exist in their warring and very troubled present, and as reflected through echoes of the past. The Suspended Step of the Stork takes place on the Greek-Albanian border, while Ulysses' Gaze takes Angelopoulos and his main figure, simply referred to as "A" and played by Harvey Keitel, from Greece to Albania, and on to the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia, Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia and, finally, into wartorn Bosnia. There is, however, yet another way of viewing Angelopoulos' career, as David Bordwell details in his essay, and which we have acknowledged in the organisation of our collection. Bordwell sees all the films made before Voyage to Cythera as examples of "political modernism", which concentrate on groups and were shot in a minimalist manner that aimed to block "empathy". Those made since Voyage to Cythera, Bordwell explains, are "more concentrated on the individual, delineating personal crises which express, as the emigrant author of The Suspended Step of the Stork puts it, fin de siecle melancholy". Having moved outside the territorial (but not the spiritual) borders of Greece in Ulysses' Gaze, Angelopoulos speaks in our interview of making a film in the United States. The theme would be familiar, of course: the desire for nostos ("home" , and thus "nostalgia") that Greeks in America feel. But not only Greeks. He wishes to look at those who have washed up on American shores, and to suggest that the "melting pot" concept of American culture is most likely far too simplistic a vision of what is actually going on. Angelopoulos' recent films have made us very aware that a century is ending. Angelopoulos should be still making films as the new

6

century begins, which just may suggest some of the new possibilities an old world can expect. IV. The essays This collection is meant to be representative, rather than exhaustive, in its commentary on and study of Angelopoulos' work. David Bordwell - well-known for his extensive theoretical contributions to the study of American cinema, film history, narrative, as well as Japanese cinema, Eisenstein, and the present state of "post-theory" in cinema studies - has also been a long-time admirer of Angelopoulos' work. As the opening essay of the anthology, this piece places Angelopoulos' films within a wide tradition of European cinema since the 1 960s. Bordwell sees the influences of modernism and minimalism practised by a variety of filmmakers, from Bertolucci to Godard, Fellini, Resnais, Pasolini and Rossellini, but especially by Antonioni. Furthermore, Bordwell notes that these influences suggest Angelopoulos is "more a synthesizer than a unique original", but goes on to say that many great artists such as Prokofiev and Modigliani (and Homer too, we might add) were "synthesizers" more than originals. Within such a context, Bordwell clearly explores the cinematic style which Angelopoulos has developed in both periods of his work, and the effect of "melancholy" (which I would call a form of "nostalgia") they produce. Bordwell concludes that Angelopoulos is "[o]ften majestic, sometimes mannered, almost always melancholic", and certainly a filmmaker who demonstrates that "cinematic modernism can still open our eyes". Dan Georgakas is a Greek-American writer, film critic, editor and author, as well as one of the founders of Cineaste magazine, which : over the past quarter of a century, has been the leading film journal in the United States with a political perspective. Georgakas thus writes as someone with dual cinematic citizenship. He understands the flow and detail of Greek history, culture, politics and cinema, and he is able to pull back and observe the broader importance of Angelopoulos' work, especially his chosen subject in this essay, 1be Travelling Players. In a fascinating examination of this film, which is a cornerstone to all of Angelopoulos' work, Georgakas is able to provide an extremely lucid pinpointing of the political aims and cinematic accomplishment of Angelopoulos in this film, in comparison with the "political cinema" of the French-Greek director, Costa-Gavras, best known for his fast­ paced, Hollywood-styled political thriller, Z ( 1 968) . Georgakas' essay brings many fresh insights to an English-language readership, as he notes, for instance, the similarity between the quest

7

for "a genuinely national cinema", that is paralleled in Greek music by composers and musicians attempting to forge a truly "Greek" sound based on elements of religious, folk and secular music of the past. He is also able to show how Angelopoulos plays with both folk drama elements and the ancient tragic myth of the Agamemnon cycle, especially the Electra story, to create a complex web of allusions and implications. On this note, he sees a basic patterning at play: "[t]he syndrome of betrayal and redemption lays over the lives of the travelling players of Greece" . Finally, Georgakas gives Angelopoulos credit for making good "on his promise to rescue ancient myth from the academics, and return it to the arena of popular entertainment". More people saw 1be Travelling Players when it came out in 1 975 in Greece than any other previous Greek film for a very simple reason: for the first time, Greeks were seeing onscreen a portrayal of the Greek Civil War told from the perspective of the Left. Georgakas' observations cast much light on how such an "engaged" film has played an important role in the ongoing dialogue of what it means to be Greek at the end of the 20th century. The essay by Vasilis Rafalidis not only represents a fully "Greek" perspective on Angelopoulos, but also helps to lead us towards an understanding of Angelopoulos' second major phase of filmmaking: the focus on the individual , as opposed to the group. Rafalidis is one of Greece's most respected author-critics, and has written not only for papers and periodicals, but also extended studies, including a book on the Balkans. A critic with a wide multicultural appreciation, Rafalidis frames his discussion of Voyage to Cythera within a context of European art, literature and cinema. He sees the parallels, for instance, between Baudelaire and Watteau and Angelopoulos, as he, Rafalidis, searches for the "centre" of this remarkable film. As in Georgakas, identity is a major theme here, for the old man in the film, Spyros, is seen as "a Greek of the periphery" - or, as he points out, "Spyros is a King Lear who has lost his kingdom in the Civil War" . Readers should appreciate that Rafalidis is firmly in the European tradition of writing criticism drawing from a wealth of European culture, ranging from classical to pop and the postmodern. Gerald O'Grady was responsible for organising the first retrospective of Angelopoulos' films in the United States, held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1990. His piece on 1be Beekeeper helps us to understand how both Angelopoulos' art and his view of life itself "build" on images and segments, much as the bees in his main character's farm build their hives, by "tessellation" . That this approach leads to a cinema of contemplation is made clear in O 'Grady's closing paragraph, when he notes that Angelopoulos' films themselves can also be seen as part of a "tessellation" process, and

8

reflect more and more light "when one reflects upon them". Michael Wilmington, film critic at 7be Chicago Tribune and a contributor to numerous film journals, is appreciative of Angelopoulos' accomplishment throughout his entire career. He speaks of the effect of seeing an Angelopoulos film, and feeling that afterwards the world settled in a different rhythm. Wilmington surveys Angelopoulos' entire opus with much sensitivity, noting that "[t]hroughout, we are always aware of life on the edge, of the uncertainty and fragility of most human endeavour" . Few have expressed it so well. Yvette Biro, who came to the States from Hungary, where she was both a critic and a screenwriter, has long distinguished herself as a professor of screenwriting at New York University, and has written frequently on film for a variety of journals and newspapers, including 7be New York Times. As a Central European, she is perhaps particularly well-qualified to appreciate the clearly non-Hollywood approach to cinema that Angelopoulos' films demonstrate. Her focus is on Voyage to Cythera, which she sees as "a masterful presentation of the two worlds of reality and imagination, serving to confront them, shuffle them, and fuse them together in a dazzling display". This transitional film in Angelopoulos' career is an especially difficult one to write about. Yet, Biro teases out the stylistic as well as the political and historical implications of this film, which could be called Angelopoulos' Otto e mezzo (Blh). Biro concludes that Angelopoulos' shuffling of reality and imagination in this film within a dream within a film places the narrative in the "conditional" tense, thus fusing "a new sense of time". Fredric Jameson has for many years in an impressive series of books and essays helped to shape the American theoretical discourse on the interplay of literature, cinema, history and a political awareness of the production of artistic texts in relation to their cultures. His contribution began as a preface for this collection, but very soon grew into a full essay, as did his enthusiasm for discussing Angelopoulos' use of style and form as an expression of history and a form of "late modernism" . Jameson rightly identifies the significance of style as "the central category both of modernist production in all the arts, and also of the multiple ideologies with which the various modernisms have secured their hegemony over the institutions" . H e then suggests the ways in which Angelopoulos has been able, in his early "group-oriented" films and his present individual-centred works, to establish a cinema that is truly "historical", as opposed to the traditional narrative films that are merely placed within an historical period. For Jameson, this accomplishment has to do in part with Angelopoulos' presentation of materiality, his ability to neutralize comm odity fetishism, and his "non-synchronous" narrative structure,

9

among other characteristics. Finally, Jameson sees that Angelopoulos' latest film, Ulysses' Gaze, suggests a completely new phase in the director's career, one which affords "unexpected glimpses of the narrative forms of the future, an inconceivable high art yet to come of the epoch of globalization and transnational communication, and worldwide mass culture". Jameson frames our collection with a view to the future, for he suggests this new phase which Angelopoulos has entered, as his camera and characters wander the wartorn Balkans in Ulysses' Gaze, may well be the beginning of "an active prophecy of new and future forms". My interview with Angelopoulos which concludes the collection was made during the summer of 1 995, when he had just won the Grand Jury prize at Cannes, and was beginning to figure out which of over twenty international festivals, to which the film had been invited, he would attend. It was, in that sense, the perfect time to catch the filmmaker - between projects and after the exhausting two-year odyssey of filming Ulysses' Gaze. The interview allows the reader some insight into both Angelopoulos the artist and Angelopoulos the man, and, we should add, Angelopoulos the Greek. At the end of 7be Suspended Step of the Stork, the young television journalist returns to the border between Greece and Albania and sees a string of telephone poles, each with a man in a yellow raincoat beginning to rewire the broken communication lines that cross the border. The image is striking not only for its echoes of orthodox icons of the Crucifixion, but also as a suggestion of the hope for a future with communication beyond borders of any sort. We hope that this collection can serve a similar function. Notes

I have also written about Angelopoulos in The Films of Tbeo A ngelopoulos: A Cinema of Contemplation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). I thus see this present volume as a companion work which, taken together, offers a full range of coverage of Angelopoulos' cinema . Richard Corliss , "Cannes Goes Under", Time 12 June 1995: 68-70. 3

George Seferis in Four Greek Poets, translated and edited by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966): 62-63. Emphasis added. 4

Wolfram Schutte , "Land-Surveyor and Time-Traveller: The Greek Film Director Thea Angelopoulos" (published notes with the CD, Eleni Karaindrou: Music for Films [Munich: ECM Records, 1991)).

10

Modernism, minimalism, melancholy: Angelopoulos and visual style David Bordwell

I. I take Angelopoulos to be a modernist director - not only a modern one, and almost certainly not a postmodernist one (whatever that might be) . T�_ ulti��.!.t:_.!'.��?�S g�_r!��-'-