"Theo Angelopoulos is a masterful filmmaker. He really understands how to control the frame. There are sequences in his work—the wedding scene in The Suspended Step of the Stork; the rape scene in Landscape in the Mist; or any given scene in The Traveling Players—where the slightest movement, the slightest change in distance, sends reverberations through the film and through the viewer. The total effect is hypnotic, sweeping, and profoundly emotional. His sense of control is almost otherworldly." -Martin Scorsese.-[1]
It` been a year since
Theodoros Angelopoulos tragically died on January 24 2012 in a road accident, on location while shooting his last film “The Other Sea”.
In honor of his memory, all his films will be screened at theatres in Athens, Thessaloniki and Larissa from 24 to 30 of January 2013, a suitable homage to a man who lived and breathed through his art. Audiences will have the chance to watch again or get acquainted with the films of one of cinema`s greatest, at their natural habitat, the movie theater, and from the original 35mm copies.
(You can find the screenings schedule
here)
Theodoros Angelopoulos has been justly called a master of cinema, a poet of the moving image and an anatomist of the recent history and politics of Greece. His movies have won numerous awards, including the 1998 Palme d` Or for
Eternity And A Day.
In His Own Words
On
The Suspended Step of the Stork: In dealing with borders, boundaries, the mixing of languages and cultures today, I am trying to seek a new humanism, a new way.
[2]
Landscape in the Mist is not just about two children looking for their father. It is a journey which is the initiation into life. On the road they learn everything - love and death, lies and truth, beauty and destruction. The journey is simply a way to focus on what life gives us all.
[3]
On
The Bee Keeper: It΄s a gesture of despair at the end, but a the moment when he tips over the beehives, he tries to communicate by tapping on the ground in the way that prisoners tap. Because he΄s a prisoner of a situation and he tries to communicate with past events.... Beekeepers are poetic beings. They have a rapport with nature, and the gathering of honey is like an artistic activity. He communicates with feelings, and at the end he cannot continue that communication. His final despairing gesture is directed also against the bees themselves, like a sculptor would die by toppling his statue onto himself.
[4]
On
The Travelling Players: Greek people have grown up caressing dead stones. I΄ve tried to bring mythology down from the heights and directly to the people.
[5]
On
Ulysses` Gaze: Every filmmaker remembers the first time he looked through the viewfinder of a camera. It is a moment which is not so much the discovery of cinema but the discovery of the world. But there comes a moment when the filmmaker begins to doubt his own capacity to see things, when he no longer knows if his gaze is right and innocent.
[6]
In
Voyage to Cythera the voyage is really a reworking of the myth of the Return of Odysseus according to a myth which preceded Homer. Similar to Dante΄s version, there is a pre-Homeric version that Odysseus set sail again after reaching Ithaca. So the film becomes more a leaving than a homecoming. I have a soft spot for the ancient writings. There really is nothing new. We are all just revising and reconsidering ideas that the ancients first treated.
[7]
[1] Horton, Andrew (1999) [1997]. The Films of Theo Angelopoulos: A Cinema of Contemplation. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
