Greece's haunting recent past, Theodoros Angelopoulos dreamlike historical cinema

Greece - the perfect vacation destination - beautiful beaches, unlimited islands, seaside cuisine, and the lingering ruins of a mythologized ancient culture, the beginning of western civilization. Though these may be ideas that come into the average person’s mind when thinking about the country, its recent history has been scarred by economic problems, political upheavals, and wars that are much less attractive. The cinema of Theodoros Angelopoulos seeks to come to terms with these opposing images, focusing on the tragic recent history of the country with the natural beauty and idealised past always present in the background.

Angelopoulos films are easily identified not only for the content of their melancholy recollections of an unforgiving 20th century string of events, but also for their unique style. While directors from Orson Welles to the Italian Neorealists have been known for their use of long takes shot in deep focus, possibly no other director in the history of cinema used these shots to the same effect as Angelopoulos. His shots go on endlessly, and one can only marvel as to how they are accomplished with such natural flare. His most revered film, The Travelling Players, a film with a run time of 3 hours and 45 minutes, was famously shot in only 80 takes. His camera hovers around at a slow, angelic pace. His sense of space and choreography is truly remarkable. His camera can start in long shot, pan across the landscape, zoom, and after several minutes, before we know it, hardly even aware of the slow, precise movements, the frame has been converted into a close up without any cuts. The planning that went into so many of Angelopoulos’ scenes is mind numbing, and watching their execution slowly play out is a magical experience.

Thanks to their cinematography, magic and dreams really do come to mind when watching his films, despite their real life depiction of events. His films are anything but realist. Often one shot will mix time periods, the camera silently bobs here and there and time disappears as people and events effortlessly merge and travel through time. Memories, stories, and real action happen in the same frame. In this way, Angelopoulos' camera captures a poetic portrait of history free of time and space, flowing from the real to the imagined, from dreams to nightmares, from past history to the present consequence.

This technique gives his films a hypnotic feeling. With all this said, they are not for the impatient. All of them run over 2 hours, and some of them are nearly 3 hours or longer. Dialogue is often sparse, and the camera stays on an image long after most directors would have cut away. Sometimes the shots are taken from so far away that it can be difficult to identify the characters, and it takes time to understand who is who. His films are not meant for passive viewers either. He does anything but hold the audiences’ hand. An Angelopoulos film is an experience, but a collaborative one. The audiences’ intelligence and attention is key to following and drawing conclusions from his films.

The film that would establish Angelopoulos as a master director, while also establishing a style that he would never stray from, was The Travelling Players, an epic about a group of travelling actors who live through the difficult years from just before World War II to the Axis occupation followed by the British occupation, Civil War, and dictatorship. The actors go from village to village trying to perform a play, Golpho the Shepherdess, but are unable to ever finish it due to external interruptions from turbulent real world events. Quickly these external events not only interrupt the company’s play, but their personal lives as well. In three devastating monologues, three of the members recount their experiences. Agamemnon enlists in the war and goes off to fight and explains how they were treated by Italian and British forces, and how on his return he would be unable to find his family again. Electra, in many ways the heart and soul of the film, gives the second monologue after being raped and abandoned by soldiers. She speaks about the German and British occupations and how tragic and unfair life in Greece was during the time. The final monologue is given by Pylades who speaks about his time in camps as they tortured him until he renounced his communist beliefs by signing a petition. (As can be inferred from the characters' names, they are also modern representations of the classic Greek characters.) These scenes are moving and infuriating, and a complete contrast from the rest of the film with its lack of closeups and dialogue. Here we get up close and personal before returning to the expansive open frames and epic shots.

Scenes are composed of dreamlike grandeur that seem to encompass both didactic action while representing something much bigger are endless, and often contain political songs opposed to dialogue. In the beginning of the film the actors are in a restaurant and a military band outside starts playing. After they leave Pylades scoffs before breaking out into a communist song. Another member, Aegistnus, a short but stern looking man stands on his chair, raises his arm in a fascist salute and continues the song the band played before. From the beginning Angelopolous makes it clear that these wars are not only tearing the country apart, but will turn this company of family and friends inside out as well.

Another brilliant musical scene happens in a music hall on New Years 1946. Near the band is a group of political leftests who are joyfully talking, drinking and dancing to the catchy music. In the back is a threatening group of young men. Electra comes into the hall and the camera stealthily follows her as she moves through the swaying couples towards the stage. The camera takes a couple more back and forth movements as the two groups exchange glances and unheard words. Finally a sort of chant off begins with one group singing a political song only to be interrupted by the other. The entire scene is marvellously captured in a single shot with the camera moving to and fro. Again the mastery and coordination needed to execute such a scene would be at the forefront of the audiences’ mind if they were not so involved in the on screen action. In the end the royalists win the battle. Not by song or intellect, but by force, pulling out guns against their unarmed opponents and kicking them out.

The next scene is equally absorbing as the royalists leave the dance hall drunk and tired after a long night. They walk in group and again burst into song. The camera follows their march for several minutes before they reach a political manifestation of right wingers looking to elect a coronel in 1952. They scream in support as they reach the crowd in support of the speaker. Angelopoulos does this several times throughout the film, connecting Nazis, English occupiers, and Greek fascists over the years as one horrific and oppressive force takes over for another. The fluidity of the time travel is seamless.

Angelopoulos' depiction of protest and battle scenes are equally impressive. His use of the long shot is particularly effective in scenes both of military order and chaotic disorder. Thanks to his use of uncountable extras the scenes are given an epic scope of the immensity and unpredictableness of the situation. In one especially memorable scene the actors are taken in by German soldiers and about to be executed. Aegistnus raises his hands pathetically trying to explain in Greek that he is their comrade. He is greeted with cold indifference as the superior Germans order him back in line for his execution. Suddenly rebel warriors attack just in time and the Germans distractedly go to defend the fort. After a day of fighting, the actors wake up and realise the Germans have abandoned the area. They shout with glee and join hundreds of other prisoners in screaming and running in celebration towards their liberators. All this is shot far away, giving us a view from above of the seaside fort and hundreds of extras as small as ants are freed. One of them takes the Nazi flag and carries it to the edge of the fort walls to throw it over as liberators shoot in the air and soldiers in horseback ride on the beach towards them. This is one of several epic visionary scenes which are emotionally thrilling and visually dazzling in their use of long shot and extras.

Even though The Travelling Players was the first film that really established Angelopolous’ style and reputation, it is surely his masterpiece, and is composed of all the elements he would incorporate in his future films. Each of his films are best described by these long continuous scenes composed of one shot that are as unforgettable as they are impressive.

In Voyage to Cythera, Spyros, an old man returns to Greece from the Soviet Union after amnesty has been granted to political ‘criminals’ from past wars. He returns to a family and a country that no longer knows him and that he is equally unable to recognize. Now living in the city, the family takes him back to their village in the mountains. When they arrive on an eerie, foggy afternoon suddenly a whistle is heard in the air. Spyros answers and his wife explains that he is speaking with an old friend in the secret language they communicated in during the Civil War. He is reunited with his friend in the cemetery and he casually greets his fallen comrades' tombstones as he passes them. Then he and his friend begin to sing and dance a traditional song, surely one they used to dance to in their youth. The death of tradition is one of the main themes of the film. The village is dying. They have brought Spyros there to sign a document to sell his home and land to a company to build. All the other residents have agreed, who have almost certainly also moved to more urban locations. Spyros refuses, but the uselessness of his actions is then represented by a beautifully distressing scene of his shed on the mountainside on fire. He no longer belongs in Greece, and no matter what he does, the Greece he fought for was lost and is gone, and he will be forced to accept it or be expelled again.

In the end, the Greek government decides to get rid of him. He has become a man with no nationality. The Soviets will not take him unless he wants to go and the Greeks have instructions not to let him back on Greek soil. He is therefore abandoned on a dock in open water. His wife asked to be joined with him, and the film ends with the grim image of the floating away into the cold nothingness of the fog as Spyros unties the dock and lets it roam into the open sea.

From an old man returning to Greece to two young children leaving it, In another of his masterpieces, Landscape in the Fog, Angelopoulos follows Voula and Alexandros who escape from home to look for their unknown father who their mother informed them lives in Germany. The film, once again, is filled with complicated symbolic long takes. The primary theme seems to be about the death or passing of something that is now unrecoverable, possibly Greece’s soul. As the children abandon Greece looking for something that may not exist, so too does Greece’s past glory seem lost. In one scene the children come across a dying white house being dragged by a truck. As they stop to watch its dying breath we see scenes from a wedding in the background, the participants unaware of the gruesome scene. First the bride is seen running away through the snow, pursued by the groom he convinces her to come back to the party. She follows him, and as the horse finally dies we see the entire party dancing one after the other, still oblivious of the majestic creature’s dead body. Here Angelopoulos is critiquing modern Greece’s ability to forget or ignore what is right in front of their eyes. A tragedy is overlooked as the country loses its soul. This is reiterated when the theatre company from The Travelling Players reemerges. In a particularly Felliniesque scene they are seen wandering aimlessly on the beach uttering lines from the classic film as they wait to perform Golpho yet again. But through this bizarre group of ghostlike actors appears the theatre manager to inform them that they can no longer host them. There is going to be a dance that will give him more money. Greece no longer has the attention for art. Golpho will be impossible to perform again. Not because of war, but because of indifference.

But perhaps the most extraordinary scene that drives this point forth is a scene where the children and Orestis, a man who continually helps them, see a giant hand, the remains of a statue with the index finger broken off, magically emerge from the depths of the sea. Cables attach it to a helicopter that takes it off in the distance. The disembodied hand beautifully hovers, twisting slowly in circles and disappearing from view. Greece’s past accomplishments are always in plain view, but all that remains of them are ruins.

The film is also a heartbreaking coming of age story for Voula. She is brutally raped by a truck driver in a horrifyingly minimalist scene. The driver drags her out of the passenger’s seat, takes her to the back of the truck and closes the curtain. In a single take the camera starts far from the truck and slowly pans towards the back cover. We see nothing for a minute or two but look in shock knowing exactly what is happening. Finally the man reamerges, Voula moves forward to sit on the end of the truck, blood streaming from between her legs. The driver then removes them and drives off abandoning them. The camera barely moves, yet it communicates so much.

Voula also takes a liking to Orestis, but her heart is broken when she sees him going off with another man. Her and her brother leave him and start walking down an endless deserted highway. As he approaches them the camera moves towards them. Orestis, understanding what happened, takes Voula in his arms and consoles her as the camera circles their friendly embrace. This is how it feels the first time he assures her. It is one of the most moving scenes I have ever seen that perfectly relates what it is to get your heart broken.

In the end of the film the children finally reach the German border, depicted similar to the border in Eternity and a Day, as the entry to the underworld. The children take a boat across a river, but a spotlight tower sees them. A single gunshot is heard followed by a cut to black. Next the children are seen in a foggy landscape. They see a single tree in the distance, move towards it and hunch at its base hugging it. The tree in the fog is the same one we see in a piece of film Orestis sees on the ground earlier in the film. Did they really make it to Germany, or have they passed onto the afterlife? It is left up for us to decide.

In 1995 Angelopoulos would work with Harvey Kietel on Ulysses' Gaze. Though his type of film does not seem as welcoming to famous actors, he worked with some of the greatest international actors of the time including Marcelo Mastroianni, Jeanne Moreau, Erland Josephson, Bruno Ganz, and William Dafoe, and never changed his style. In Ulysses Gaze Kietel goes on a search for the first Balkan film ever made in the midst of the Balkan Wars. The film is unsurprisingly filled with more mesmerizing scenes such as a New Years party where Kietel remembers dancing with his mother as the party changes years in the same shot depicting the families misfortunes over the years. In one moment Kietel disappears from the frame. When he is called back in for a family photo he is replaced by a young boy, showing his real age at the time. The same woman that plays his mother also plays his various love interests during his travels, and there is another appearance of a disembodied statue flying mystically through the air, this time in the form of Lenin’s head and various other extremities. Finally, in one of the last moments in the film, while in wartorn Sarajevo, fog descends on the town and its inhabitants are able to get a taste of freedom as they are covered from possible bombings. A music group performs in the open composed of all the different peoples from the Balkan area demonstrating that together, even in war, humanity is capable of true beauty.

The film that would finally win Angelopoulos the coveted Palme d’Or at Cannes would be Eternity and a Day, perhaps, even in its sadness, the most touching and optimistic of his films. The wonderful Bruno Ganz is an author who plays music when he wakes up and receives an answer from an unknown neighbor who plays the same piece. He is dying though no one knows it. On his last day before admitting himself into the hospital for treatment he saves a young Serbian boy from men who captured him for an illegal adoption. Together, this young boy who has seen too much tragedy in his young life, and this sick and world weary old man find solace and friendship. In an inexplicably wonderful scene they decide to jump on a bus. The dreamlike soundtrack plays as they travel through the city and people get on and off the bus including an arguing couple, a man with a red flag from a protest, and a poet who has been long dead. The boy and the old man giddily take in the events before their final, emotional parting as the boy boards a ferry going to an unknown destination across the sea.

The final scene is one of Angelopoulos’ most magical. Alexander goes back to his beach home, a home we were informed at in the beginning that his daughter and her husband had just sold. As he looks through the second floor window he travels back in time to see his mother on the balcony rocking his newborn daughter, and his wife on the beach with musicians all dressed in white on either side of her. The camera inexplicably traverses the window and slowly glides towards his wife who beckons him. He joins her and they begin to dance. In his wifes loving arms he announces he will not go to the hospital tomorrow. He will not resign himself to a slow death of treatment. He asks her how long tomorrow will last and she says Eternity and a Day before exiting the frame with the other musicians. Alexander is left alone again, the memories of his past vanished, yet their appearance has given him the strength and will to continue.

Angelopoulos himself would die on set while filming in 2004. He died on his battlefield, where he looked into the past to show the truth and devastation that forever changed his homeland. Yet if there is anything his films show us, it is that the country that was home to Homer, the first storyteller recorded in Western Civilization, though battered by war and economic depression and corrupt politicians, still is home to artists who create immortal works of art.