Theo Angelopoulos was born in Athens in 1935. After studying law at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, he attended courses at L L`'IDHEC and then grew close to Jean Rouch. Back in Greece, he was hired as film critic for the daily Allagi, which was closed down by the military junta. He began working on Forminx Story, a feature-length film about a pop group in 1965 but the film was never finished. This was followed by Broadcast (Ekpompbi) a short he made in 1968.
In 1970 he completed his first feature Reconstruction (Anaparastassi) won an award at the Festival d`Hyeres and got noticed in Berlin, calling the attention of critics of the world over to Theo Angelopoulos.
His next three films make up a trilogy on the history of contemporary Greece. With Days of `36, The Traveling Players and The Hunters some of the thematic and stylistic constants of Angelopoulos` cinema were established. The weight of history, a clinical examination of power, a Brechtian theatricality, wherein the individual has no importance with respect to the group, a rejection of conventional narration in favor of an intentionally broken one, in which stationary cameras and sequence-length shots create an alternative sense of time.
After many awarded masterpieces Theo Angelopoulos died on January 24th 2012, on set of his latest film, The Other Sea.
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