{"id":302,"date":"2012-04-01T13:42:01","date_gmt":"2012-04-01T13:42:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/landc.wpengine.com\/silhouette\/?p=302"},"modified":"2015-05-02T16:23:44","modified_gmt":"2015-05-02T16:23:44","slug":"theo-angelopoulos-greece","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/learningandcreativity.com\/silhouette\/theo-angelopoulos-greece\/","title":{"rendered":"Theo Angelopoulos And Greece"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"ulysses<\/a>In a memorable scene from his 1995 film, Ulysses\u2019 Gaze<\/em>, A. (Harvey Keitel), the exiled film-maker is being driven from Greece to Albania in a taxi. The taxi driver (Thanassis Veggos) halts when he predicts a snow-storm, and after sharing a drink, he cries out for his homeland in a lament, \u201cGreece is dying. We\u2019re dying as a people. We\u2019ve come full circle; I don\u2019t know how many years, among broken stones and statues… and we\u2019re dying. But if Greece is going to die, she\u2019d better do it quickly because the agony lasts too long and makes too much noise.\u201d<\/p>\n

On the 24th of January, 2012, Theo Angelopoulos, the director of this film and many other renowned ones, succumbed to his injuries sustained in a motorcycle accident, around the same time when his homeland, Greece, is suffering from a severe economic crisis, and to quote Fatima Bhutto in a completely different context, is on the verge of a \u201cnervous breakdown\u201d.<\/p>\n

The magic realist of the Balkans, Theo Angelopoulos ushers in his films a different Greece, a different humanity: one that suffers from melancholia at the breakdown of democratic state policies; where Odysseus returns in the twentieth century to find a nation that mocks its classical past, thrives on repressive state policies and dictatorship, and corrupt and dynastic measures.<\/p>\n

Angelopoulos makes nostalgic journeys into the past and weaves \u2013 much like the Manakia<\/span>\u00a0Brothers to whom he paid a tribute in Ulysses\u2019 Gaze<\/em> \u2013 epic cinema out of the fragments of ordinary life. His exiled travelling people never fully make it back to their Ithaca.<\/p>\n

Through their \u201cgaze\u201d of the embittered landscape, and through the Nietzschian concept of eternal return, the hierophants of Odysseus desperately try to preserve humanity through imagined beauty. Hence it is only in Angelopoulos\u2019 lens that fellow inhabitants of Sarajevo venture out on a foggy evening, when the smog renders it impossible for the snipers to carry out their mission, and remark at the beauty of the world, and be swayed wordlessly by classical music in a bombed-out, open air, makeshift amphitheatre.<\/p>\n

\"Ulysses

The sad state of contemporary Greece is built against Angelopoulos\u2019 poignant poetry of images
(Pic: Theo Angelopoulos<\/a>)<\/p><\/div>\n

The sad state of contemporary Greece is built against Angelopoulos\u2019 poignant poetry of images. In The Travelling Players,<\/em> Angelopoulos portrays a road narrative through the Grecian provinces, and reveals the fascism, the absence of democracy and national identity, at the face of the military junta.<\/p>\n

In Landscape in the Mist<\/em> the social-realist air merges into surrealism as the director takes his audience once again through misty towns and snowy wilderness. His life-long tendency to amalgamate Greek myths and history into current political events is revealed once again in his oedipal drama The Weeping Meadow<\/em>. He stands \u2013 along with the few representing the Greek cultural Renaissance in the second half of the 20th century \u2013 as a testimony to the elites of his nation who have constantly belittled their culture in lieu of insatiable consumerism which has redefined Greek modernity.<\/p>\n

The sensual medium: Ulysses’ Gaze<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n