Days of '36 (1972), the first film in what would become Angelopoulos' self-described trilogy of history, which also includes The Travelling Players and O Megalexandros, continued the tradition of depicting the changing cultural environment of rural Greece via stories from modern history. The film is a subversive indictment of the then-ruling military junta (1967–1975), whose heavy-handed method of governance and retention of power relied on violence, intimidation, and censorship of the opposition. It is ostensibly inspired by an actual prison hostage situation involving a parliament official in 1936.
While the events depicted in Days of '36 were compressed over a short period of time, Angelopoulos' epic masterpiece, The Travelling Players, is pivotally set in the years 1939–1952, and provides an expansive framework that spans the pro-monarchy Metaxas dictatorship (1936–1941), the German occupation of Athens (1941–1944) during World War II, and the Greek Civil War (1944–1949). The film follows a poor travelling theatre group as they strive to present (but never manage to finish) a pastoral play named Golpho the Sheperdess amid the violent unravelling of Greek history during the mid-twentieth century.
The problematic pattern of foreign intervention in Greek sovereignty depicted in The Travelling Players is also visible in O Megalexandros, a densely structured film that interweaves two of Angelopoulos' predilections—history (the late 19th century kidnapping of aristocratic British tourists by Greek bandits in Marathon) and myth (the bandit leader who believes he is the reincarnation of the Greek god Zeus) (utopia). Angelopoulos' filmmaking had already begun to reflect on his generation's failing idealism, a disappointment that he would later communicate in Ulysses' Gaze with the elegiac image of Lenin's demolished monument atop a drifting salvage barge.
Angelopoulos' use of allusive, iconic representation in O Megalexandros is also evident in The Hunters (1977), a thematic epilogue to the historical trilogy about a group of middle-aged hunters who discover the perfectly preserved, 30-year-old frozen remains of a partisan (bearing an uncanny resemblance to the Byzantine image of Jesus Christ) and are compelled to resurrect him. The film, set in post-junta Greece, is a modern metaphor on the country's willful repression of unpleasant and ugly past, as well as communal denial of personal responsibility.
Angelopoulos aimed to depict the human toll of its sad legacy after bringing his daring re-evaluation of 20th century Greek history to modern-day Greece. The result is a series of haunting, incisive, intimate, and deeply moving odysseys through consciousness, myth, and memory that the filmmaker refers to as the "trilogy of silence": the silence of history (Voyage to Cythera), the silence of love (The Beekeeper [1986]), and the silence of God (The Beekeeper [1986]). (Landscape in the Mist).
This is the second part of an interview by Gerald O’Grady with Theo Angelopoulos in Athens, 1990. Translated by Steve Dandolos and Stefanos Papazacharias.
GO: It seems to me that, more than any other director on the world scene, your characters inhabit not only a distinct place, but also a distinct time. There is no question but that your screen vibrates with a physical presence of Greece-the stones, the streets, the walls, the roofs, the skies, the rain, the fog. You have few, if any, peers in conveying this sense of place. But I think your feeling for time, for history, is what makes you different. Your first film, Reconstruction, is a reenactment of a real murder, based on newspaper accounts and court records; the historical trilogy speaks for itself; and even Spyros, as he travels from the north to the south of Greece in The Beekeeper, remembers, in almost cinema-verite-like flash backs, scenes of his earlier life. You really bind the mind to actuality, to history, even if you acknowledge that it is a reconstruction, and, of course, you continually refer your characters to heroes in earlier Greek history, through allusions to the classics, mentioned above. How do you explain this acute sense of history, this "documentary" thrust in your films?
TA: I wouldn’t call this sense of history "a documentary thrust." I rather think it is a Greek tradition. If we recall the Greek classics, we notice that most of them work with myths referring to much older periods, and in this context history is used as a continuous backdrop, independent of any thematic concerns. My attachment to our history derives from the fact that I am Greek, from the overall relationship of history with Greek art and specifically with literature, and in this century, with Greek cinema. For many years, in my country, no unconventional approach to history was conceivable; the general consensus was the only acceptable attitude. But after the collapse of the dictatorship in 1974, there was a real explosion in Greece in terms of historical-political films. These films should have been done years ago. I am not referring, of course, to my own films, because I was exploring this territory already during the dictatorship. I mean the Greek cinema in general, which started discussing these things only after they were gone, and by then it was too late. At the same time, one has to concede that the Greek cinema, due to lack of resources, was dependent on comedies or star-studded tearjerk ers, thus bringing forward mostly farces and melodramas for domestic con sumption. Once in a while, there was a film that contained elements of real tragedy, like Cacoyannis’s Stella, Drakos by Kondouros, based on folklore, or Paranomi, by the same Kondouros, based on history.
If we are to speak about time, we must divide it into historical time and "timing." Usually, a move in time is achieved through flashbacks, through a cut that never attempts to manipulate historical time. In an old American film by Laszlo Benendek the movement from present to past takes place within the same space through a simple change in lighting. In a Swedish film, Miss Julie, time moves through the personal reminiscences of the characters; in other words, every time one of them recollects something from the past, we are taken back to it. What I did was something that was achieved for the first time in the history of cinema. My own work is based on what we call collective memory, and more than collective individual memory, on collective historical memory, mixing time in the same space, changing time not through_a flashback that corresponds to a person but to a collective memory, and this was accomplished without a cut. The change was made within the same shot in such a way that three or four different historical periods coexist within the space of this shot, a series of frightening leaps into time. For example, in The Travelling Players an actor is talking about Asia Minor while the train is travelling in the year 1940, the beginning of the war. When the train stops, the actor gets off and looking straight into the camera he goes on talking about the war in Asia Minor that happened in 1922. But when he looks into the camera saying all these things, that moment is now, now being each time one sees the film. In this manner three different historical times are being juxtaposed, the present, 1940, and 1922. In another scene, the new cast of the travelling players are seen walking down a street in the year 1952 until they vanish, and in that moment the shot becomes panoramic and we see a German vintage car entering the same shot in 1942. As the camera refocuses on the spot where the travelling players had vanished, we now see German soldiers, as the shot is pursued without any interruption. This becomes a continuous, dialectic presentation of different historical moments, but at the same time preventing any factual relationship between them. Therefore, while watching this scene, a second emotion, provided by the cinema language, is added to the initial one. I mean that in the way I use time, time becomes space and space, in a strange way, becomes time. I don’t know if what I say makes sense, but there exists an accordion of time and space, a continuous accordion that lends a different dimension to the events being shown on the screen.
GO: Let’s try to discuss now what has become one of the defining visual characteristics of your work, the long take, the tracking shot, the 360 circular shot, all strategies to allow or "make" the viewer "really" see the shot and its specific duration. How did you hit upon it, what is your purpose, does it have anything to do with space or time, or their interaction? Is this at all related to the fact that some of your films are particularly long, and with your choice of placing contemporary characters in the context of the cultural history of your country?
TA: The characteristics of my own work derive, first of all, from my many years of viewing cinema. For years, I watched every type of film around me and absorbed things I found interesting, and when, later on, I attempted to write and to make films, it all came back to the surface and became style, writing, personal writing. If I have to explain this, I would say that my preference for the long shot, the sequence shot, stems from my rejection of what is generally referred to as parallel editing, for I consider it fabricated. For historical reasons I accept the work of all those who resorted to this type of montage, like Eisenstein, but this is not my kind of cinema. In a certain manner, for me, each shot is a living thing, with a breath of its own, that consists of inhaling and exhaling. This is a process that cannot accept any interference; it must have a natural opening and fading.
In today’s cinema, the so-called dead time-silence and pauses-has be come obsolete. This undefined time that functions between one act and an other has disappeared. For me, even silence needs to function in an almost musical way, not to be fabricated through cuts or through dead shots but to exist internally inside the shot. I have used fast and slow internal rhythms in the long shot in order to project a ceremonial element. Megalexandros is structured like a Byzantine liturgy containing this ceremonial element in the form of a theatrical gesture that needs to be completed in a specific timing. The term choreography has been often used in relation to my films. I would not call it that because faces cannot be choreographed. The space is being choreographed by the continuous action that forces this space to open and close like an accordion. The editing is internal and a sequence that might require ten shots in the conventional system of editing is now conveyed in one, which contains all ten because it can literally be cut in as many shots. I did this by not excluding the so-called dead time, the silences.
Contrary to the American model that demands multiple angles for every single scene, I believe that for each shot there is one angle and one angle only. This, for me, is a basic rule of the game. Something we have not dis cussed is the way I use the fixed shot. For example, the rape scene in my last film (Landscape in the Mist) is a fixed shot where the sound has more meaning than the image we see. In this fixed shot, the sound functions in a way that gives rhythm to the space, while simultaneously it creates a second level of meaning outside the film. It is like a painting that does not end inside the frame but continues outside of it. Likewise the power of suggestion is exercised dynamically in order to free the imagination of the audience, so they can create for themselves a picture inside the picture. The audience exists dynamically and not passively, when they add their imagination to that of the director. Of course you know very well that in Greek tragedy all the important events take place on stage and never behind the stage. For me, the tracking shot creates an accordion of space through the travelling of the cam era. The space expands or shrinks depending on the proximity of the lens to the filmed objects; there is a continuous flow that brings incredible flexibility inside the shot, like the flow of running water.
For the filming of The Travelling Players the camera was always on a moving track even if it had to move ten centimeters in order to create a flow. The 360-degree shot is used to emphasize the meaning of the circle that already exists as a concept inside the film. In Megalexandros, it is obvious the circle is part of all forms, and it evolves from the circular stage of the ancient theater where all action was being performed. Look, today when someone begins to make cinema, cinema is his starting point. My generation began differently. My development was influenced by literature. I began by writing poems and short stories and only then did I move to film. Therefore I am influenced by a different space, where the act of writing is the dominant rule of the game. Consequently I sought the same in cinema.
GO: Your New York retrospective opens with The Beekeeper, and I would like to pose two questions about that film, both relating to icons or images. It is the first film in which you have used a major international "star." Marcello Mastroianni offers a very distinct icon, developed over many other works, to any film in which he acts. How did you understand that icon, and how did you used it and, at the same time, refashion it? The other question involves the relationship between the written script and the actual process of shooting. Every aspect of the mise-en-scene- Spyros’s house, the hotels he stays in, his boyhood home, his destination itself, not to mention jukeboxes and soda pop stands-take on aspects of a beehive. Is that very complicated iconographic presence already designed at the outset or does it develop as the film is being shot, and how does this process take place?
TA: My intention was to use Mastroianni but to reverse the image he projects. I was looking for an actor who could carry the film on his shoulders. The role excluded any display of virtuosity and demanded a style of acting that is esoteric and silent, and this, I think, is the opposite of the image Mastroianni has been projecting. I was afraid that any other actor and mainly the ones I know here in Greece would have been crushed by the weight of this role. Mastroianni, on the contrary, carried the film not only because he is a good actor but also by using this weight as an image.
Sometimes my films are the exact mirror of the script; other times, the script is in the form of notes and then the filming process is very dependent on improvisation. In some cases, there is a dynamic that allows you to use improvisations, while in others you have the feeling that you have to follow exactly the written script. This depends entirely on the material you have to work with and does not depend at all on the circumstances surrounding the making of the film. The circumstances I have encountered until now vary from the very good to the very bad, but it did not prevent me from doing what I intended to do. For example, Landscape in the Mist is an exact copy of the script while The Travelling Players began from notes. Voyage to Cythera is very far from the original script and The Beekeeper very close to it.
I write the scripts and try them on the various people I have conversations with, like a game of Ping-Pong, where they act either as devil’s advocates or as catalysts. This dialogue with other persons becomes essential to the writing of the script; it is a process of continuous inventions that occur only during the time I converse with them. The image from which I began the Voyage to Cythera was of the two old people on a raft in the middle of the sea. For Landscape in the Mist the first image was that of a city covered in fog and a hand that dissolves it.
GO: It seems to me that, more than any other director on the world scene, your characters inhabit not only a distinct place, but also a distinct time. There is no question but that your screen vibrates with a physical presence of Greece-the stones, the streets, the walls, the roofs, the skies, the rain, the fog. You have few, if any, peers in conveying this sense of place. But I think your feeling for time, for history, is what makes you different. Your first film, Reconstruction, is a reenactment of a real murder, based on newspaper accounts and court records; the historical trilogy speaks for itself; and even Spyros, as he travels from the north to the south of Greece in The Beekeeper, remembers, in almost cinema-verite-like flash backs, scenes of his earlier life. You really bind the mind to actuality, to history, even if you acknowledge that it is a reconstruction, and, of course, you continually refer your characters to heroes in earlier Greek history, through allusions to the classics, mentioned above. How do you explain this acute sense of history, this "documentary" thrust in your films?
TA: I wouldn’t call this sense of history "a documentary thrust." I rather think it is a Greek tradition. If we recall the Greek classics, we notice that most of them work with myths referring to much older periods, and in this context history is used as a continuous backdrop, independent of any thematic concerns. My attachment to our history derives from the fact that I am Greek, from the overall relationship of history with Greek art and specifically with literature, and in this century, with Greek cinema. For many years, in my country, no unconventional approach to history was conceivable; the general consensus was the only acceptable attitude. But after the collapse of the dictatorship in 1974, there was a real explosion in Greece in terms of historical-political films. These films should have been done years ago. I am not referring, of course, to my own films, because I was exploring this territory already during the dictatorship. I mean the Greek cinema in general, which started discussing these things only after they were gone, and by then it was too late. At the same time, one has to concede that the Greek cinema, due to lack of resources, was dependent on comedies or star-studded tearjerk ers, thus bringing forward mostly farces and melodramas for domestic con sumption. Once in a while, there was a film that contained elements of real tragedy, like Cacoyannis’s Stella, Drakos by Kondouros, based on folklore, or Paranomi, by the same Kondouros, based on history.
If we are to speak about time, we must divide it into historical time and "timing." Usually, a move in time is achieved through flashbacks, through a cut that never attempts to manipulate historical time. In an old American film by Laszlo Benendek the movement from present to past takes place within the same space through a simple change in lighting. In a Swedish film, Miss Julie, time moves through the personal reminiscences of the characters; in other words, every time one of them recollects something from the past, we are taken back to it. What I did was something that was achieved for the first time in the history of cinema. My own work is based on what we call collective memory, and more than collective individual memory, on collective historical memory, mixing time in the same space, changing time not through_a flashback that corresponds to a person but to a collective memory, and this was accomplished without a cut. The change was made within the same shot in such a way that three or four different historical periods coexist within the space of this shot, a series of frightening leaps into time. For example, in The Travelling Players an actor is talking about Asia Minor while the train is travelling in the year 1940, the beginning of the war. When the train stops, the actor gets off and looking straight into the camera he goes on talking about the war in Asia Minor that happened in 1922. But when he looks into the camera saying all these things, that moment is now, now being each time one sees the film. In this manner three different historical times are being juxtaposed, the present, 1940, and 1922. In another scene, the new cast of the travelling players are seen walking down a street in the year 1952 until they vanish, and in that moment the shot becomes panoramic and we see a German vintage car entering the same shot in 1942. As the camera refocuses on the spot where the travelling players had vanished, we now see German soldiers, as the shot is pursued without any interruption. This becomes a continuous, dialectic presentation of different historical moments, but at the same time preventing any factual relationship between them. Therefore, while watching this scene, a second emotion, provided by the cinema language, is added to the initial one. I mean that in the way I use time, time becomes space and space, in a strange way, becomes time. I don’t know if what I say makes sense, but there exists an accordion of time and space, a continuous accordion that lends a different dimension to the events being shown on the screen.
GO: Let’s try to discuss now what has become one of the defining visual characteristics of your work, the long take, the tracking shot, the 360 circular shot, all strategies to allow or "make" the viewer "really" see the shot and its specific duration. How did you hit upon it, what is your purpose, does it have anything to do with space or time, or their interaction? Is this at all related to the fact that some of your films are particularly long, and with your choice of placing contemporary characters in the context of the cultural history of your country?
TA: The characteristics of my own work derive, first of all, from my many years of viewing cinema. For years, I watched every type of film around me and absorbed things I found interesting, and when, later on, I attempted to write and to make films, it all came back to the surface and became style, writing, personal writing. If I have to explain this, I would say that my preference for the long shot, the sequence shot, stems from my rejection of what is generally referred to as parallel editing, for I consider it fabricated. For historical reasons I accept the work of all those who resorted to this type of montage, like Eisenstein, but this is not my kind of cinema. In a certain manner, for me, each shot is a living thing, with a breath of its own, that consists of inhaling and exhaling. This is a process that cannot accept any interference; it must have a natural opening and fading.
In today’s cinema, the so-called dead time-silence and pauses-has be come obsolete. This undefined time that functions between one act and an other has disappeared. For me, even silence needs to function in an almost musical way, not to be fabricated through cuts or through dead shots but to exist internally inside the shot. I have used fast and slow internal rhythms in the long shot in order to project a ceremonial element. Megalexandros is structured like a Byzantine liturgy containing this ceremonial element in the form of a theatrical gesture that needs to be completed in a specific timing. The term choreography has been often used in relation to my films. I would not call it that because faces cannot be choreographed. The space is being choreographed by the continuous action that forces this space to open and close like an accordion. The editing is internal and a sequence that might require ten shots in the conventional system of editing is now conveyed in one, which contains all ten because it can literally be cut in as many shots. I did this by not excluding the so-called dead time, the silences.
Contrary to the American model that demands multiple angles for every single scene, I believe that for each shot there is one angle and one angle only. This, for me, is a basic rule of the game. Something we have not dis cussed is the way I use the fixed shot. For example, the rape scene in my last film (Landscape in the Mist) is a fixed shot where the sound has more meaning than the image we see. In this fixed shot, the sound functions in a way that gives rhythm to the space, while simultaneously it creates a second level of meaning outside the film. It is like a painting that does not end inside the frame but continues outside of it. Likewise the power of suggestion is exercised dynamically in order to free the imagination of the audience, so they can create for themselves a picture inside the picture. The audience exists dynamically and not passively, when they add their imagination to that of the director. Of course you know very well that in Greek tragedy all the important events take place on stage and never behind the stage. For me, the tracking shot creates an accordion of space through the travelling of the cam era. The space expands or shrinks depending on the proximity of the lens to the filmed objects; there is a continuous flow that brings incredible flexibility inside the shot, like the flow of running water.
For the filming of The Travelling Players the camera was always on a moving track even if it had to move ten centimeters in order to create a flow. The 360-degree shot is used to emphasize the meaning of the circle that already exists as a concept inside the film. In Megalexandros, it is obvious the circle is part of all forms, and it evolves from the circular stage of the ancient theater where all action was being performed. Look, today when someone begins to make cinema, cinema is his starting point. My generation began differently. My development was influenced by literature. I began by writing poems and short stories and only then did I move to film. Therefore I am influenced by a different space, where the act of writing is the dominant rule of the game. Consequently I sought the same in cinema.
GO: Your New York retrospective opens with The Beekeeper, and I would like to pose two questions about that film, both relating to icons or images. It is the first film in which you have used a major international "star." Marcello Mastroianni offers a very distinct icon, developed over many other works, to any film in which he acts. How did you understand that icon, and how did you used it and, at the same time, refashion it? The other question involves the relationship between the written script and the actual process of shooting. Every aspect of the mise-en-scene- Spyros’s house, the hotels he stays in, his boyhood home, his destination itself, not to mention jukeboxes and soda pop stands-take on aspects of a beehive. Is that very complicated iconographic presence already designed at the outset or does it develop as the film is being shot, and how does this process take place?
TA: My intention was to use Mastroianni but to reverse the image he projects. I was looking for an actor who could carry the film on his shoulders. The role excluded any display of virtuosity and demanded a style of acting that is esoteric and silent, and this, I think, is the opposite of the image Mastroianni has been projecting. I was afraid that any other actor and mainly the ones I know here in Greece would have been crushed by the weight of this role. Mastroianni, on the contrary, carried the film not only because he is a good actor but also by using this weight as an image.
Sometimes my films are the exact mirror of the script; other times, the script is in the form of notes and then the filming process is very dependent on improvisation. In some cases, there is a dynamic that allows you to use improvisations, while in others you have the feeling that you have to follow exactly the written script. This depends entirely on the material you have to work with and does not depend at all on the circumstances surrounding the making of the film. The circumstances I have encountered until now vary from the very good to the very bad, but it did not prevent me from doing what I intended to do. For example, Landscape in the Mist is an exact copy of the script while The Travelling Players began from notes. Voyage to Cythera is very far from the original script and The Beekeeper very close to it.
I write the scripts and try them on the various people I have conversations with, like a game of Ping-Pong, where they act either as devil’s advocates or as catalysts. This dialogue with other persons becomes essential to the writing of the script; it is a process of continuous inventions that occur only during the time I converse with them. The image from which I began the Voyage to Cythera was of the two old people on a raft in the middle of the sea. For Landscape in the Mist the first image was that of a city covered in fog and a hand that dissolves it.