Having arrived home from seeing Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance in central London, LWLies was mortified to discover that Greek filmmaker Theo Angelopoulos had recently passed away, the tragic upshot of a motorcycle collision in Athens on the set of his new film, The Other Sea.
As someone who was only introduced to his astounding cinematic oeuvre fairly recently – via the wholesale R2 DVD re-release of his back catalogue through Artificial Eye – it’s tough to comment on the specifics of his relationship with the contemporary European art cinema scene. Though his untimely death remains shocking and deeply upsetting, particularly as The Other Sea – described as a dream-like speculation on the future of Europe and purportedly half way through a six-week shoot – will now join the sorry annuls of great unfinished artworks. So distinctive is his visual mode that the notion someone else might take up the reins on the film just does not compute.
To the very end, the name Angelopoulos encapsulated the ne plus ultra of laconic, overcast and often highly inscrutable auteur cinema. His films tend to cast off the shackles of time and space, instead focusing on the alchemical mysteries of existence and nature. The most fitting point of comparison is that watching a film by Angelopoulos is like witnessing the inexorable shifting of tectonic plates, seeing the world in a state of majestic flux. This feeling was usually achieved with long and immaculately constructed sequences shots which became the director’s trademark.
He perhaps remains best know for the understandably lauded (and understandably little-seen) The Travelling Players, in which he carefully channels the sociopolitical transitions of Greece during the years between 1939 and 1952 through a band of roving and increasingly desperate theatre performers. While one can detect formal echoes in works like Jia Zhang-ke’s Platform or Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s The Puppetmaster, it still exists on its own monumental plateau, a monolithic Brechtian odyssey that secured the director’s reputation as an innovator from the very off.
His final film, The Dust of Time, largely retained the rigorous template he’d developed for over three decades in masterpieces like the Palme d’Or winning Eternity and a Day or the magisterial, child’s eye road movie, Landscape in the Mist. An elegiac European saga which addresses the manifold problems of age, identity and the creative process, The Dust of Time sees Willem Dafoe as a film director whose daughter goes missing, an occurrence which halts production on his latest autobiographical film. Directors in the midst of existential meltdown were commonplace in Angelopoulos’s work, featuring in films like Ulysses’ Gaze and Voyage to Cythera.
Angelopoulos was fascinated by the potency of the recorded image. He pushed the notion that filmmaking is, in essence, a way of capturing the passing of time. The sheer scale and seriousness of his films also suggest that he thought filmmakers had a duty to carry out, that the creation of cinema should be seen as a form of collective soul-searching and not simple entertainment. He also saw film as a tactile medium: why manufacture an illusion cheaply and sloppily via CGI when you can, say flood an entire purpose-build village (as in Trilogy: The Weeping Meadow) or transport a gigantic, disembodied bust of Lenin down river? (as in Ulysses’ Gaze). For Angelopoulos, the process was the point.
And it’s hard to think of another filmmaker who shares that utterly uncompromising creed. If you haven’t seen the films, wait to see them on proper prints and projected on the biggest screen possible: one suspects it’s what this late master would have wanted.
Theo Angelopoulos – 1935-2012 (text) by David Jenkins is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
