After studying film in Paris in the 1960s, Theo Angelopoulos returned to Athens and accepted a job as a film critic for the left-wing newspaper Demokratiki Allaghi. He continued to work for the publication until it was shut down in 1967 as part of Colonel Papadopoulos' military junta's assault on the opposition. During his time at Demokratiki Allaghi, he was hired for a promotional film project by Greek composer Vangelis for an upcoming American tour, which, despite Angelopoulos' premature dismissal, is notable in that it provided the young filmmaker with the funding he needed to shoot his first (released) short film: an experimental satire Broadcast (1968), for which he won the Critics' Prize at the Thessaloniki Film Festival.
For his first feature film Angelopoulos drew inspiration from a real-life murder of a guest worker by his wife and her lover after returning home from Germany, notable for revealing the influence of his documentary training under Jean Rouch in Paris. Using the potentially scandalous narrative material to present a broader social and anthropological commentary on the dying of the Greek village—and, as a result, the essence of the Greek soul—a cultural preoccupation that he later would develop into the masterpieces of his maturework, the deeply conscientious filmmaker creates an episodically non-sequential film-within-a-film entitled Reconstruction (1970).
The village is a small version of the real world. The old Greek villages had a soul, a life that was full of work, play, and celebration. Of fact, by the turn of the century, Greek villages had begun to dwindle in population, but it was World War II and the subsequent Civil War in Greece that entirely obliterated the reality and notion of the Greek village. These two disasters completely altered our way of life.
“The transformation [to a village-centered nation] would have been considerably more gradual and delicate. You must understand that, as a result of these battles, over 500,000 village men went to work as guest workers in Germany, America, Australia, and other countries in the 1950s. This resulted in a significant change in village life. The males vanished and only the ladies remained. The spirit of the communities began to fade as a result of all of these changes.”
Even in his first feature, Angelopoulos shows a glimpse of his innately personal cinema in the opening sequence, which depicts the husband Costas (Michalis Photopoulos) returning to Epirus one day after an extended sojourn as an overseas guest worker—an autobiographical incident based on Angelopoulos' own father's unexpected reappearance after months of uncertainty over his fate (the family had already become resigned to the tragic probability that he had been executed).
Angelopoulos would go on to become an acknowledged maser of world cinema: ‘Theodoros Angelopoulos’s considerable achievements in cinema during the 1970s and 1980s have made him not only the most important Greek filmmaker to date, but one of the truly creative and original artists of his time… If his style shows some influences—particularly Jancsó’s one reel-one take methodology and Antonioni’s slow, meditative mood—Angelopoulos has nevertheless created an authentic epic cinema akin to Brecht’s theatre in which aesthetic emotion is counterbalanced by a reflexive approach that questions the surfaces of reality. The audience is not allowed to identify with a central character, nor to follow a dramatic development, nor given a reassuring morality.’ - Michel Ciment (International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers, 2000)
The following is extracted from an Interview by Gerald O’Grady with Theo Angelopoulos in Athens, 1990. Translated by Steve Dandolos and Stefanos Papazacharias.
GO: Your films are well known and have received many awards throughout all the countries in Europe and Japan. But, here in the United States, only a very few have ever been shown and then only sporadically, before your complete retrospective at The Museum of Modem Art in February. And it is only this month that two of your films, one made fifteen years ago and the other your most recent, are finally being put into commercial distribution. Despite the international consensus that you rank with such masters as Antonioni, Mizoguchi, and Tarkovsky, your work is almost com pletely unknown to the American audience, including its film critics and its academics. Our first task, it seems to me, is to indicate how different your approach to the cinema is from our American model, though I know that you, on the other hand, are very familiar with all of our popular genres and directors from the 1940s to the present. What I would be most interested in is a descriptive account of your impulses and methods in comparison with those of a typical American director. You might, I hope, talk about why, over a six-year period, you made three films, Days of ’36, The Travelling Players, and The Hunters, which explore the twenty years of Greek political history starting with your birth. No American does that kind of thing.
TA : First of all I don’t think anyone could say with absolute certainty that there is a clear distinction between American and European cinema. But in any case, during the first years after the liberation, from ’44 on, the American cinema was the only kind available in Greece, and therefore this was the first cinema my generation could see. I know that older directors such as Antonioni, Fellini, or Visconti were influenced more by the French than the American cinema or maybe I should say they began their careers having knowledge of both.
In any case, the impact of the American cinema was felt in Europe for the first time after the war. Its tendencies for detective stories, musicals, social drama, and melodrama and its use of a certain type of narrative to tell these stories were very much favored by mass audiences. As such, it influenced the first postwar generation, namely my own, perhaps the generation after mine and possibly the next one as well. When, by the end of the fifties, the New Wave exploded in France, it represented for people like myself the discovery of another option.
The film that really moved me was Godard’s Breathless, a detective story in disguise, written in a completely different manner. There is a tremendous disparity in writing between John Huston’s classic detective stories and Godard’s, but for us, Godard offered the appropriate stimulus by revealing an other type of discourse. Of course he was not absolutely original and his option was not the only one. Before him there was the Italian neo-realism and a different approach to writing as it relates to "timing," in the films of Antonioni. In addition, for those of us who managed to follow it, there was also the Japanese cinema. All these kinds of cinema revealed for us a variety of alternatives for writing films and for film making in general. Without realizing it, I found myself making certain choices, though I must say that my initial intellectual experience derived from literature. Therefore, I was pre pared for a completely different discourse, as far as texts are concerned. I read mainly the great European writers, but also the Americans we knew so well in Greece, from Whitman to Hemingway, Steinbeck, Faulkner, and DosPassos. It is interesting that historically American writers have been always trying to relate to the Europeans. But this did not happen in cinema. Euro pean and American literature are much closer related than the European and American cinema.
Of course, Greek literature and specifically Greek tragedy, which represents my first encounter with theater, had an enormous influence on me. Trying to make my own choices in light of all these experiences, I soon reached the conclusion that the story and its writing process are of equal importance. By the way, many times the process of writing ends up becoming the story of the film. Therefore, not only the stories I narrate but also the way in which I narrate them are equally important to me.
Being born shortly before WW2, I could not avoid being marked by history, particularly that of my own country. The dictatorship before the war, then the war and everything that happened after it: the civil war and then another dictatorship. It would have been impossible for me to escape from my own life and experience. In my attempt to understand I make films based on history or reflections on history. It is only natural for me to delve into my own past in order to define my own story within the history of a place. During the ’67-’ 74 dictatorship in Greece I suddenly underwent this shock. Everything I had experienced as a young boy with my father, his being jailed and later sentenced to death, and a lot of other things, all these events came back to me and became the material to review my personal history in the context of my country’s history.
GO: Our audience is quite familiar with the work, for example, of Ingmar Bergman, who, like yourself, writes all of his own scripts. But while you use, just like him, a regular cameraman, in your case Giorgos Arvanitis, for all your films, and you also have the tendency to work with the same ensemble of actors and actresses, I sense there is a major difference between the two of you. He seems to write his scripts with his performers in mind, but you don’t. Also, while his fictions express his own personal psychic stresses, even neuroses (and I don’t mean that in a critical way), your work centers more on the contemporary political history of your own country and is also mediated through your own cultural history, Homer, Aeschylus, Euripides and Sophocles, and Alexander the Great. I think it might be useful if you would define your modus operandi in relation to Bergman’s, so that we can use the known to prepare us for the unknown.
TA: I don’t find any similarities between my work and Bergman’s. My cinema is not psychological, it is epic; the individual in it is not psychoanalyzed but placed within a historical context. My characters assume all the elements of epic cinema or, if I may say so, those of epic poetry, typically featuring clear-cut persona. In Homer, Odysseus is a shrewd conniver, Achilles is brave, loyal to his friends-and these characteristics never change. The same with Brecht whose characters are larger than life; they serve as carriers of history or ideas. My characters are not being analyzed, they are not tormented, like Bergman’s. They are more humane. They search for lost things, all that was lost in the rupture between desire and reality. Until not very long ago the history of the world was based on desire; the desire to change the world one way or another. Now at the end of the century we realize that whatever was desired never really happened, and it did not happen for reasons that I am unable to explain. Perhaps it was impossible to change things using the specific methods that were employed at the time, but in any case, we are left with the experience of our failure, with the ashes of the disappointment of dreams that never materialized. My last three films reflect this taste of ashes, leaving the desire to be pursued in some future time, in the next discourse. My writing and Bergman’s do not relate. In his films there is a strong meta physical element which identifies the search for the father figure with the search for God or the denial of God. I think that in my own work, the father figure does not represent a goal in itself; the purpose of my films is to find a reason to exist. My films are not as metaphysical. They are, in a strange way, more existential than Bergman’s. This is certainly the case for the trilogy Voyage to Cythera, The Beekeeper, and Landscape in the Mist.
GO: In between your historical trilogy, Days of ’36, Travelling Players, and The Hunters, and the second one, there is Megalexandros. While still partially based on actual history, an event which took place in 1870 when a group of English tourists was kidnapped by Greek bandits from Marathon, it is largely concerned with elements of the fantastic, even the surrealistic. It retells a popular legend that de rives from the fifteenth century, about a country waiting for a liberator, a sort of messiah, but once he emerges, he turns into a tyrant. At the same time, the film seems to be an allegorical meditation on modern dictators. Is this really the pursuit of history by other means, and is this tension between realism and surrealism more central to your work than it first appears to be?
TA: Megalexandros is a philosophical-political reflection on power, on the problems of authority, and as such it represents the bitter end result of my previous three films. Whatever could be identified as human hope in my earlier work tends to shrink in this one, dissolved as if from within, and this is tragic. Megalexandros addressed the concentration of power long before the changes in Eastern Europe took place, and in this respect it was a prophetic film on the failure of the socialist experiment in this part of the world. I could not have spelled it out in any other way at the time. I had to use the form of a myth. I did not want to make use of authentic facts because it would have imposed a departure from a poetic language, and I believe that a film must be, before anything else, a poetic event, otherwise it does not exist. This is true for the work of directors I admire, like Oshima and the Tavianis, who are using similar methods, going back into the past in order to speak about the present.
The following is extracted from an Interview by Gerald O’Grady with Theo Angelopoulos in Athens, 1990. Translated by Steve Dandolos and Stefanos Papazacharias.
GO: Your films are well known and have received many awards throughout all the countries in Europe and Japan. But, here in the United States, only a very few have ever been shown and then only sporadically, before your complete retrospective at The Museum of Modem Art in February. And it is only this month that two of your films, one made fifteen years ago and the other your most recent, are finally being put into commercial distribution. Despite the international consensus that you rank with such masters as Antonioni, Mizoguchi, and Tarkovsky, your work is almost com pletely unknown to the American audience, including its film critics and its academics. Our first task, it seems to me, is to indicate how different your approach to the cinema is from our American model, though I know that you, on the other hand, are very familiar with all of our popular genres and directors from the 1940s to the present. What I would be most interested in is a descriptive account of your impulses and methods in comparison with those of a typical American director. You might, I hope, talk about why, over a six-year period, you made three films, Days of ’36, The Travelling Players, and The Hunters, which explore the twenty years of Greek political history starting with your birth. No American does that kind of thing.
TA : First of all I don’t think anyone could say with absolute certainty that there is a clear distinction between American and European cinema. But in any case, during the first years after the liberation, from ’44 on, the American cinema was the only kind available in Greece, and therefore this was the first cinema my generation could see. I know that older directors such as Antonioni, Fellini, or Visconti were influenced more by the French than the American cinema or maybe I should say they began their careers having knowledge of both.
The film that really moved me was Godard’s Breathless, a detective story in disguise, written in a completely different manner. There is a tremendous disparity in writing between John Huston’s classic detective stories and Godard’s, but for us, Godard offered the appropriate stimulus by revealing an other type of discourse. Of course he was not absolutely original and his option was not the only one. Before him there was the Italian neo-realism and a different approach to writing as it relates to "timing," in the films of Antonioni. In addition, for those of us who managed to follow it, there was also the Japanese cinema. All these kinds of cinema revealed for us a variety of alternatives for writing films and for film making in general. Without realizing it, I found myself making certain choices, though I must say that my initial intellectual experience derived from literature. Therefore, I was pre pared for a completely different discourse, as far as texts are concerned. I read mainly the great European writers, but also the Americans we knew so well in Greece, from Whitman to Hemingway, Steinbeck, Faulkner, and DosPassos. It is interesting that historically American writers have been always trying to relate to the Europeans. But this did not happen in cinema. Euro pean and American literature are much closer related than the European and American cinema.
Of course, Greek literature and specifically Greek tragedy, which represents my first encounter with theater, had an enormous influence on me. Trying to make my own choices in light of all these experiences, I soon reached the conclusion that the story and its writing process are of equal importance. By the way, many times the process of writing ends up becoming the story of the film. Therefore, not only the stories I narrate but also the way in which I narrate them are equally important to me.
Being born shortly before WW2, I could not avoid being marked by history, particularly that of my own country. The dictatorship before the war, then the war and everything that happened after it: the civil war and then another dictatorship. It would have been impossible for me to escape from my own life and experience. In my attempt to understand I make films based on history or reflections on history. It is only natural for me to delve into my own past in order to define my own story within the history of a place. During the ’67-’ 74 dictatorship in Greece I suddenly underwent this shock. Everything I had experienced as a young boy with my father, his being jailed and later sentenced to death, and a lot of other things, all these events came back to me and became the material to review my personal history in the context of my country’s history.
GO: Our audience is quite familiar with the work, for example, of Ingmar Bergman, who, like yourself, writes all of his own scripts. But while you use, just like him, a regular cameraman, in your case Giorgos Arvanitis, for all your films, and you also have the tendency to work with the same ensemble of actors and actresses, I sense there is a major difference between the two of you. He seems to write his scripts with his performers in mind, but you don’t. Also, while his fictions express his own personal psychic stresses, even neuroses (and I don’t mean that in a critical way), your work centers more on the contemporary political history of your own country and is also mediated through your own cultural history, Homer, Aeschylus, Euripides and Sophocles, and Alexander the Great. I think it might be useful if you would define your modus operandi in relation to Bergman’s, so that we can use the known to prepare us for the unknown.
TA: I don’t find any similarities between my work and Bergman’s. My cinema is not psychological, it is epic; the individual in it is not psychoanalyzed but placed within a historical context. My characters assume all the elements of epic cinema or, if I may say so, those of epic poetry, typically featuring clear-cut persona. In Homer, Odysseus is a shrewd conniver, Achilles is brave, loyal to his friends-and these characteristics never change. The same with Brecht whose characters are larger than life; they serve as carriers of history or ideas. My characters are not being analyzed, they are not tormented, like Bergman’s. They are more humane. They search for lost things, all that was lost in the rupture between desire and reality. Until not very long ago the history of the world was based on desire; the desire to change the world one way or another. Now at the end of the century we realize that whatever was desired never really happened, and it did not happen for reasons that I am unable to explain. Perhaps it was impossible to change things using the specific methods that were employed at the time, but in any case, we are left with the experience of our failure, with the ashes of the disappointment of dreams that never materialized. My last three films reflect this taste of ashes, leaving the desire to be pursued in some future time, in the next discourse. My writing and Bergman’s do not relate. In his films there is a strong meta physical element which identifies the search for the father figure with the search for God or the denial of God. I think that in my own work, the father figure does not represent a goal in itself; the purpose of my films is to find a reason to exist. My films are not as metaphysical. They are, in a strange way, more existential than Bergman’s. This is certainly the case for the trilogy Voyage to Cythera, The Beekeeper, and Landscape in the Mist.
GO: In between your historical trilogy, Days of ’36, Travelling Players, and The Hunters, and the second one, there is Megalexandros. While still partially based on actual history, an event which took place in 1870 when a group of English tourists was kidnapped by Greek bandits from Marathon, it is largely concerned with elements of the fantastic, even the surrealistic. It retells a popular legend that de rives from the fifteenth century, about a country waiting for a liberator, a sort of messiah, but once he emerges, he turns into a tyrant. At the same time, the film seems to be an allegorical meditation on modern dictators. Is this really the pursuit of history by other means, and is this tension between realism and surrealism more central to your work than it first appears to be?
TA: Megalexandros is a philosophical-political reflection on power, on the problems of authority, and as such it represents the bitter end result of my previous three films. Whatever could be identified as human hope in my earlier work tends to shrink in this one, dissolved as if from within, and this is tragic. Megalexandros addressed the concentration of power long before the changes in Eastern Europe took place, and in this respect it was a prophetic film on the failure of the socialist experiment in this part of the world. I could not have spelled it out in any other way at the time. I had to use the form of a myth. I did not want to make use of authentic facts because it would have imposed a departure from a poetic language, and I believe that a film must be, before anything else, a poetic event, otherwise it does not exist. This is true for the work of directors I admire, like Oshima and the Tavianis, who are using similar methods, going back into the past in order to speak about the present.
