Theo Angelopoulos, one of the world’s most celebrated and
revered contemporary directors, passed away earlier this year from being stuck
by a motorcycle. It was only then that I realized I had only seen one film by Angelopoulos,
a filmmaker many consider a master. Although there is no one to blame but
myself, I nonetheless also hold US distributors partially responsible for my
failure. Of Angelopoulos’ thirteen feature films, only a scant few are
available commercially in the US: Landscapes
in the Mist (1988), Eternity and a
Day (1998), and The Weeping Meadow,
my one blissful theatrical success. All are probably available to those who are
clever with a computer (that’s not me) and those perfectly comfortable with
subpar quality (also not me), but the point is that for 42 years much of
Angelopoulos’ oeuvre has been ignored stateside.
My solution, combined with a modest goal, is to make this
right through the power of the free market. Artificial Eye recently released
three box sets in the UK that include all of Angelopoulos’ features, the third
and final set coming a mere two months after his accidental death. (The possibly
that these releases, 13 DVDs in all, were in anticipation for Angelopoulos’
final chapter in his trilogy on modern Greece, The Other Sea now languishing unfinished, is just another reminder
of the loss.)
Volume 1, which includes his debut The Reconstruction, as well as the three films Days of ’36, The Traveling Players, and The Hunters, landed recently in NE
Minneapolis. Here’s a rundown of the first four films of this dearly departed visionary
and film craftsman.
The Reconstruction
(1970)
It’s hard not to get hyperbolic with a debut like The Reconstruction, a film where
traditional narrative structure and typical camerawork is abandoned for
vanguard innovation. Angelopoulos uses a story ripped from the headlines much
like Nagisa Oshima—as a static impression filtered with creative prowess. In
this case, Angelopoulos maps a crime of passion from cerebral free-form
ingenuity. Made in 1970 and shot in black and white, the film is set in Tymphaia,
a town that is described in the introduction as having a population of 1250 in
1939 and a population of 85 in 1965. In this sleepy small town there was an
absent husband, an illicit affair, and, upon the husband’s return, a murder.
Angelopoulos sets his thesis in motion from film one,
exploring the patience and profundity of the long shot and meddling with the
pliant nature of time in storytelling. Patterned with the failed attempt to
conceal the crime and the eventual police interrogation, the action reveals
method and madness, but very little passion from the earthy adulterous couple. Cleverly,
The Reconstruction steers clear of
melodrama, knowing that the most titillating factor of true crime is never
really knowing what happened. The massaging of the details around the edges of
the murder becomes a setup to the film’s last, elegant and ultimately
overpowering final shot.
Days of ’36 (1972)
Theo Angelopoulos’ second film is a tougher nut to crack,
mired in Greek politics to the point where my own historical research sent me
back for a second viewing. Even then, I had a hard time grappling with the
subtle political implications traversing the era in the film and of the film. 1936
was, from a scholarly standpoint, a precarious time in Greek history. In
reality, it was no doubt chaos, built on years of war that left the country
financially devastated and coup leading to counter-coup and another
counter-coup and yet another. The result was a fragile monarchy, halfheartedly
supported due to the threat from a Fascist Italy, which nonetheless led to the
Mextaxas Regime, a fascist authoritarian leadership in and of itself. To say
that people were exhausted and divided would probably be an understatement.
But that was ’36. In 1972, Angelopoulos found himself trying
to make politically relevant films under the rule of a military junta. And his
film, underscoring the government’s humiliation delivered by one man, silently
addresses censorship, corruption, and ultimately the weak foundation the
government’s power is built upon (critiques for dual eras.) Days of ’36 takes a documentary approach
to the story of a man wrongly arrested for the assassination of a union leader.
When the prisoner takes a Greek official hostage, the reverberations throw a
giant monkey wrench into the wheels of authoritarian control. The camera never
gets too personal with its characters, and Angelopoulos deploys some brilliant
tracking shots, one specifically that culminates in the scenarios inevitable
tragedy. The subtle political riddles are tantamount to understanding the film
(which I can’t claim), but its tangible atmosphere of uncertainty is
nonetheless something to revel in.
The Traveling Players
(1975)
The proportions of The
Traveling Players, with an epic runtime of 220 minutes, are equally matched
by Angelopoulos’ artistic ambitions, elegant yet tortuously bleak. Following a
traveling theatrical troupe, this meandering film chronicles the tumultuous
years between 1939 and 1952 in Greek history. Punctuated by the troupes repetitive
performance of the folk play “Golfo the Shepherdess,” mostly in the form of
false starts interrupted by the calamities of reality, The Traveling Players critically confronts the seeds of contemporary
Greece through the tri-tumult of the Metaxas dictatorship, German occupation,
and the Greek Civil War stimulated by the apathetic Allies. While the politics
of the film are a web of convoluted specificity, not unlike Days of ’36, the bitter cynicism is loud
and clear. So loud and clear that many were perplex about how Angelopoulos
managed to get the film made right under the nose of the regime he was not so
obliquely criticizing. But both the personal and the political become intertwined
in this time capsule microcosm, the wounds open and raw.
The structure and process that Angelopoulos has laid out is
rigorous and Brechtian, but also enthralling and graceful. Angelopoulos and his
cinematographer, Giorgos Arvanitis, are less concerned with the movement of the
camera than the movement within a (mostly) steady frame, which often starts out
as empty and is organically activated and populated. The tragic layers to The Traveling Players are enunciated with
stylistic specificity—muted dusty tones, skewing amber, and precise, patient
camerawork. Many of the shots are unblinking acknowledgements of time, with
unadorned takes that refuse yield until the minutes pile up. And sometimes a
character stares right back at the camera with a historical monologue. One such moment
appears about midway through the film when a woman picks herself up from the
side of a river after a brutal beating and rape from the night before to
approach the camera and let the audience know that, for Greece, things get much
worse before they get better. It’s an unsettling historical soliloquy that
resonates far after the film ends, where the country’s post-war woes are tinged
with an aftertaste of savagery.
The Hunters (1977)
Taking place in the present, a group of hunters stumble upon
the body of a guerrilla fighter killed 28 years earlier but with wounds still
fresh, like a teleported omen from Greece’s divisive past. Angelopoulos
redefines the possibilities of cinematic language that is able to traverse time
and parables seamlessly, sometimes all in one shot. The hunters, all Right
leaning elite, and their ruminations over the dead body create an epilogue to
the maelstrom of Days of ’36 and The Traveling Players. They drag the
body, his wounds bleeding despite being dead for 30 years, to the lodge
where they are staying with their wives. Through an inquisition, the film
delves into their personal reflection, guilt, and misunderstanding of the historical
implications of the cadaver.
The Hunters rivals The Traveling Players—its
formal innovation in capturing layers of a collective unconscious through
complex sequences that look deceptively simple is matched, on those same levels,
by its narrative. It’s a two and a half hour surreal trial of the conscience,
effortlessly dissolving back and forth between flashbacks, with only fantasies
of an eventual conviction. In the end, the hunters have had enough, and they take the body,
the unwanted harbinger of compunction, back out to the snowy field and frantically
bury it back where they found it. The
Hunters is easily one of the most amazing films I have ever seen, audacious
and surprising in its absolute patience and steady vision.
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