Angelopoulos and the Lingua Franca of Modernism

IntrodUctIon Angelopoulos and the Lingua Franca of Modernism Angelos Koutsourakis and Mark Steven he twenty-eighth Cannes Film Festival in 1975 was marked by the T enthusiastic reception of a film that did not officially represent Greece, the country of its production. The right-wing government of the time refused to nominate it because it considered the leftist portrayal of modern national history offensive. Yet a Greek filmmaker and his crew managed to smuggle a copy of this film and show it as part of Pierre-Henri Deleau’s renowned pro- gramme, the Directors’ Fortnight. The filmmaker was Theo Angelopoulos and the film Ο Θίασος (The Travelling Players, 1975). While the organisers of the festival were trying to find ways to sidestep the rules stipulating that only national commissions could be awarded festival prizes, by May 20, 1975 this 230-minute film had enjoyed its fourth screening in Cannes. Deleau’s anecdote typifies the passionate response of the cinéphile community: I remember once we had a four-hour film, and we thought no one would stay until the end. But it was Angelopoulos’ The Travelling Players: it got a standing ovation. At the back of the auditorium, there was this strange-looking man walking up and down in an almost military fashion, staring straight at Angelopoulos, who had his back to the stage. The man started to walk towards him and Angelopoulos began to get worried. Then he went down on his knees, kissed Angelopoulos’ feet and left without saying a word. It was Werner Herzog. Later, when I mentioned this to Werner, he told me that the film had made him jealous so he had to genuflect before the filmmaker. That’s the rivalry between great filmmakers, a kind of good jealousy. (cited in Mandelbaum 2008) Eventually, the Cannes Film Festival broke its own rules, and The Travelling Players received the FIPRESCI Grand Prix. The film’s storyline follows a group of actors who travel in Greece during the turbulent years 1939–1952, 2 angelos koUtsoUrakIs and mark steven so as to perform a traditional bucolic drama, Golfo. Their performances are routinely interrupted by the major traumatic events of Greek history: the Metaxas dictatorship in the 1930s, the Italian invasion in 1940, the German occupation, the Greek Civil War, and the years after the defeat of the Left in the Civil War. The following year, Hugh Jenkins, the UK minister of Arts, said that The Travelling Players ‘was the most original and most important movie of 1975’, (cited in Stamatiou 1976) and the film was subsequently awarded Best Film of the Year by the British Film Institute. In France and Britain, writers in journals such as Positif and Sight and Sound announced the birth of ‘a new epic cinema’ (Jordan 1975) and ‘a film reverberating with metaphor and meaning’ (Wilson 1975: 58), while in Germany a film critic went so far as to claim that The Travelling Players was as significant in the history of cinema as The Battleship Potemkin (1925) and Roma Città Aperta (Rome Open City, 1945) (Buchcka cited in Themelis 1998: 126). Meanwhile, the film was successfully sold in Europe, in Asia and in South America, and Angelopoulos thus became a world-renowned director, whose unique style would influence filmmakers across the globe. These filmmakers include Chen Kaige,1 Jorge Sanjinés, Bernardo Bertolucci,2 Jessica Hope Woodworth, Peter Brosens, Bahman Ghobadi, and many more. But who was this Greek filmmaker who emerged from relative obscurity to become one of the canonical figures in modernist European art cinema? In France, this was not the first time he had been the topic of discussion within cinéphilic circles. In 1962, studying at the Institut des hautes études cinématographiques (Institute for Advanced Cinematographic Studies) in Paris, Angelopoulos acquired notoriety for refusing to shoot the compulsory short- film assignment using the standardised dramaturgical tropes. Instead, he decided to re-shoot a scene from Roger Vadim’s Les liaisons dangereuses (Dangerous Liaisons, 1959) using a 360° pan. While his colleagues at the Institute responded wholeheartedly to the young filmmaker’s completed project, his teacher took disciplinary action and recommended Angelopoulos’ expulsion from the school. A protest letter was signed by his classmates, as well as by important film intellectuals such as George Sadoul and Jean Mitry, but it all came to no avail. Forced to leave the IDHEC, Angelopoulos found temporary refuge in Jean Rouch’s Musée de l’Homme, where he familiarised himself with formal tropes associated with cinéma vérité. Angelopoulos was also a committed cinéphile. Prior to studying cinema he worked as a ticket seller in the Cinémathèque in Paris and as he recalled he became one of the rates de la Cinémathèque (rats of the Cinémathèque), and watched a plethora of films ranging from classical Hollywood to European and Asian cinema. Such was his belief in the visual capacity of the medium to communicate meaning that he enthusiastically watched dozens of Japanese films, even though there were no subtitles available (Archimandritis 2013: 24). IntrodUctIon 3 Figure I.1 The Travelling Players 4 angelos koUtsoUrakIs and mark steven Angelopoulos’ Parisian training was fundamental to his subsequent desire to make films that would engage with questions of national and historical specificity by using the late modernist style and a visual language that, as Alexander Kluge points out in the foreword to this book, could address historical concerns, dreams and failures on a global scale. Thus, not unlike other representatives of the New Waves in World Cinema, his project was thor- oughly anti-nationalist. As Paul Willemen rightly observes, films concerned with issues of national specificity are always ‘anti-nationalist’ because they refuse to subscribe to nationalist homogenising projects (2006: 36). In the case of Angelopoulos, one needs to add, they also play a political role, since they intend to actively shape the audience’s view of the historical particularity and therefore situation of a specific country. The mode of late modernist art cinema, as András Bálint Kovács observes, was (and it still remains) particularly pertinent in this regard, precisely because it also served the ‘modernization of a traditional national cultural environment through its integration into the modern cinematic universe’ (2007: 181). In Angelopoulos’ case, this modernisation also involved building an audience by writing seriously about cinema hence, like a number of filmmakers associated with the Nouvelle Vague, he started his career as a film-critic. Yet the task of modernising the Greek cultural landscape had, for Angelopoulos, a utopian dimension. In 1969, in an interview with his friend Vassilis Rafailidis, he explained that the cinema they desired was not the escapist one that helps one forget about everyday problems, but a cinema that keeps insistently remind- ing the viewer of his or her everyday reality (cited in Rafailidis 2003: 137). Tellingly, this desire went hand in hand with a belief in using a set of stylistic and formal narrative devices associated with modernism. As Kovács argues, the endeavoured modernisation of national film cultures in the 1960s relied deeply on ‘the employment of a set of universal stylistic solutions’ (2013: 3–4) that were successfully applied to different cultural traditions. In this context, the modernisation of different national film cultures entailed a wish to use cinema as a means of rethinking the reality of the nation by appealing to an audience beyond the national borders. This grand project initiated by the modernist art cinema says something about the utopian dream of cinema turning into a universal language of images, a dream very much thwarted by the emergence of sound and spoken dialogue. It is possible to concede here that the late modernist cinematic project was an attempt (albeit a failed one) to internationalise different film cultures without evading questions of national and historical specificity. Put simply, one cannot dissociate the films of Godard, Fassbinder, Pasolini, Visconti, Antonioni, Solanas, Jancsó, Oshima, the Taviani brothers, Pereira dos Santos, Rocha, or Angelopoulos from the national and historical contexts to which they refer. The fact that many of these filmmakers were more popular abroad IntrodUctIon 5 than in their homelands testifies to the great potential that modernist art cinema had in globalising national film cultures that shared common stylistic elements and modernist norms. Indeed, one might venture to suggest that modernist art cinema is a good example of a sustained attempt to allow for the inclusive mobility and exchange of cultural objects, which were able to address a number of national historical questions. Alain Badiou, a confirmed adversary of abstractly universal ideas, has indicated the ways that filmmakers committed to national historical enquiries have produced films with universal appeal. In a passage worth quoting, Badiou claims that: During at least one temporal sequence, the cinema’s mass dimension was not incompatible with a direct concern to invent forms in which the reality of a country occurs as a problem. This was the case in Germany, as the escort of leftism (Fassbinder, Schroeter, Wenders . .), in Portugal after the 1975 revolution (Oliveira, Botelho . .), and in Iran after the Islamic revolution (Kiarostami). In all of these examples it is clear that what cinema is capable of touches the country, as a subjective category (what is it to be from this country?). There are cinema-ideas concerning this point, such as its previous invisibility is revealed by the event. The cinema is then both modern and broad in its action. A national cinema with a universal address emerges; a national school, recognizable in everything up to its insistence on certain formal aspects. (2013: 143) The productive paradox in Badiou’s formulation is precisely that filmmakers preoccupied with their national reality managed to increase the visibility of their outputs and the national questions these outputs sought to address by means of their reliance on a set of transnational stylistic features.

Load more