The Greek director, who died on
Tuesday, was celebrated for his beautifully shot and uncompromisingly
intellectual cinema. Here we look back at his best-known films
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Theo Angelopoulos' first feature, The
Reconstruction (1970), draws on the real-life murder of a Greek worker
(Yannis Totsikas, left) in Germany by his wife (Toula Stathopoulou) and
her lover (Michalis Fotopoulos). The murder story, and its
'reconstruction', becomes a parable for the disruption of a community
and a nation – Greece was under military rule at the time. |
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Angelopoulos' second film, Days of 36,
was set during Greece's tumultuous interwar period, when unstable
governments alternated with military coups with alarming regularity.
Days of 36 focuses on a politically sensitive hostage situation, which
Angelopoulos uses to lay bare the state's fragmentation as Metaxa's
fascist dictatorship loomed. |
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Angelopoulos' international breakthrough,
The Travelling Players, is an epic tableau of 20th-century Greek
history, told through the experiences of a touring group of actors –
whose own stories are modelled on the Agamemnon myth. Among other
awards, it won the BFI's Sutherland trophy. |
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Angelopoulos took on the Stalinist cult
of personality in his 1980 movie Alexander the Great, with Omero
Antonutti as the 19th-century bandit of the title. This Alexander, whose
name references the mythic Greek figure of antiquity, wordlessly
tyrannises an agrarian commune – the liberator turned oppressor. |
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Voyage to Cythera (1984), co-scripted by
Tonino Guerra, is another parable of Greece's political history. Manos
Kakrakis, an aging Odysseus, and his wife Dora Volanaki are adrift on a
raft with no home or destination: the failure of the communist dream. |
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International icon Marcello Mastroianni
took on the lead role in Angelopoulos' 1986 chronicle of stasis and
despair, The Beekeeper. Mastroianni's Spyros travels the traditional
beekeeping routes, utterly unable to connect with the changing world
around him.
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Angelopoulos's Landscape in the Mist is
another parable of search without discovery. Two children sneak on board
a train they hope will take them to Germany – but only baffling
disappointment awaits. |
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In Ulysses' Gaze Angelopoulos secured
Harvey Keitel (here with Maia Morgenstern) to play a Greek-American
film-maker obsessed with finding lost documentary footage of 'ordinary'
people. The film was awarded the grand prix runner-up prize at Cannes;
Angelopoulos was dismayed. |
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Angelopoulos finally secured the Palme
d'Or with his 1998 film Eternity and a Day, in which a dying writer
(Bruno Ganz) helps a young Albanian boy (Archileas Skevis) as a kind of
distraction from his own impending dissolution. |
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The first in a projected trilogy, The
Weeping Meadow documents the turbulent first half of the 20th century,
following a single family from the Russian revolution to the postwar
civil conflict in Greece |
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| Angelopoulos' last completed feature was 2009's
The Dust of Time, starring Michel Piccoli, Willem Dafoe and Irene Jacob.
Dafoe takes on the Keitel role of a Greek-American film-maker; Jacob is
his mother Eleni, a woman who manages to reunite with her husband
Spyros (Piccoli) after deportation to a Soviet labour camp. |
