Angelopoulos and the Lingua Franca of Modernism

Home , Eternity and a Day, Konstantinos Demertzis, Landscape in the Mist, Nikolaos Plastiras, Theo Angelopoulos, The Dust of Time

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 Tenthusiastic 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 asThe 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. For instance, Fassbinder’s films, which were very much concerned with Germany’s Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past), travelled successfully abroad precisely because of their employment of recognisable formal solutions, such as excessive melodramatic pathos, formal abstraction and Brechtian technique, all of which were successfully reconfigured by the enfant terrible of the New German Cinema. It is precisely because of what we are calling the ‘lingua franca’ of modernist formal traits that audiences across the globe had the opportunity to engage not only with the formal innovations of his films but also with the historical past of Germany. Theo Angelopoulos is another example of a filmmaker whose films are deeply immersed in the historical experiences of his homeland, while the international appeal of his work can be attributed to his firm commitment to modernism as a formal response to the crises and failures of world history in the twentieth and twenty-first century. Angelopoulos was one of the most prominent and committed cinematic formalists whose monumental images 6 angelos koutsourakis and mark steven respond to urgent historical questions that remain pertinent even today. Let us consider his work following the commonplace (and at times problematic) periodisation of his oeuvre. In his first two films, Η Εκπομπή (Broadcast, 1968), and Αναπαράσταση (Reconstruction, 1970) the question of representation figures strongly and both films blend reality and fiction to address issues of mediation. The influence of Jean Rouch is apparent for in Broadcast we are dealing with the ways the media manage not only to regulate identity construction but also to cultivate fantasies of social mobility and individualism. In Reconstruction, the very issue of representation becomes the central task of the film. The attempt to reconstruct a murder never shown on screen diverts the viewers’ attention from the particular (an isolated dramatic event) to the general, namely the social and political causes of the crime and the ethics of representation. Thus the pressing question here could be summarised as such: how can one use the language of cinema to represent a dramatic event and create a dynamic relationship with history? In the historical tetralogy3 – Μέρες του ’36 (Days of ’36, 1972), The Travelling Players, Οι Κυνηγοί (The Hunters, 1977), Ο Μεγαλέξανδρος (Megalexandros, 1980) – the question of historical representation is the central theme of each film. In each one the emphasis is placed on modern Greek history; but the scope of these films encourages the viewer to reconsider the European post- war historical narrative. The films ask us to see history not from the point of view of grandiose historical figures, as it is the case of most period films, but from the point of view of the people as a collective subject. In Days of ’36, memories of the pre-war fascist dictatorship allude to the traumatic reality of the 1967–74 US-backed military junta of the colonels. In The Travelling Players, the employment of the myth of Atreides in a modern context results in the first cinematic recounting of modern Greek history from a leftist point of view. The formal texture of the film and its reliance on myth, folk songs and camera testimonies makes much, according to Angelopoulos, of historical memory not as an individual recounting but as the collective memory of the people (cited in Archimandritis 2013: 32). In Οι Κυνηγοί (The Hunters, 1977) the victors of history, the Greek bourgeoisie, are forced to do their own Vergangenheitsbewältigung, and come face to face with their responsibilities regarding their own role in turning Greece into a US-client state marked by electoral fraud and military coups. Finally, in Megalexandros the parable of a failed socialist experiment becomes a prescient metaphor for the forthcoming collapse of the dream of socialism in Eastern Europe. In the trilogy of silence, Ταξίδι στα Κύθηρα (Voyage to Cythera, 1984), Ο Μελισσοκόμος (The Beekeeper, 1986), and Τοπίο στην Ομίχλη (Landscape in the Mist, 1988) the emphasis shifts to the effects of history on individuals whose lives are marked by forced displacement, and failure to adapt to a world with no utopian aspirations. The trilogy of borders that follows consists of introduction 7

Το Μετέωρο Βήμα του Πελαργού (The Suspended Step of the Stork, 1991), Το Bλέμμα του Οδυσσέα (Ulysses’ Gaze, 1995) and Μια Αιωνιότητα και μια Μέρα (Eternity and a Day, 1999). It focuses on the after-effects of contemporary history drawing attention to issues of economic and political migration and to the lack of collective dreams during the reanimation of political conflicts in the Balkans. The last two completed films, Το Λιβάδι που Δακρύζει (The Weeping Meadow, 2004) and Η Σκόνη του Χρόνου (The Dust of Time, 2008) are the opening instalments of an unfinished trilogy, cut short by the director’s unex- pected death in 2012. In these films, Angelopoulos returns retroactively to historical questions. The Weeping Meadow reassesses Greece’s modern history, while The Dust of Time endeavours to come to terms with some of the major events following the end of World War II, transitioning from the final days of Stalinism to the wholesale advent of neoliberalism in the 1990s.

CRITICAL RECEPTION

Let us then summarise some of the main themes in Angelopoulos’ filmogra- phy, which are: the crisis of representation and the force of mediation; the question of representing history and how to come to terms with the past; the failures of the utopian aspirations of the twentieth century; issues of forced political or economic migration and exile; and the persistence of history in a supposedly post-historical present. Given the contemporary relevance of these questions, it is somewhat surprising to see the lack of critical attention that Angelopoulos’ cinema has received in the Anglophone scholarship, particularly in light of the fact that there is a large body of scholarship on the filmmaker in French, German, Spanish and Italian. Thus, with the exception of Andrew Horton’s sustained engagement with Angelopoulos’ cinema, and despite David Bordwell’s polemical claim that against hackneyed postmodern- ist formulas, Angelopoulos’ cinema shows that ‘cinematic modernism can still open our eyes’ (2005: 185), it seems that Angelopoulos’ work has not received the attention it deserves within the Anglophone Academy.4 There are three main reasons for this lack of critical attention. Firstly, Angelopoulos is a belated modernist and as such he might be thought of as a hard-to-place and seemingly paradoxical filmmaker, since his oeuvre successfully combines the sombre with the poetic, the austere with the stunning, defamiliarisation with pathos and melancholy. Moreover, his visual compositions borrow stylistic elements from European and Japanese art cinema as well as from classical Hollywood, including from Vincente Minnelli’s musicals and Howard Hawks’ and Billy Wilder’s noir films. His films can communicate scepticism towards the image as well as revel in their own visual indulgence. Let us illustrate this using one of Angelopoulos’ many powerful compositions. 8 angelos koutsourakis and mark steven

Figure I.2 The Suspended Step of the Stork

Near the end of The Suspended Step of the Stork a young journalist (Gregory Carr) who has been working on the disappearance of a Greek politician (Marcello Mastroianni) is framed with his back to the camera while gazing onto the lake- side landscape in the border area in the North of Greece. The character’s voice- over cites a lost politician’s book (mentioned earlier in the film) in which that politician addressed the need to invent a new collective dream for the twenty- first century. ‘Why not assume that today is the 31st of December 1999’. As the camera follows the journalist walking along the embankment, we see a group of repair workers in yellow raincoats climbing a number of telephone poles and trying to connect the wires. The antithesis between the grey landscape and the yellow raincoats generates a contrast in colour composition that produces a visual surplus, while the extra-diegetic music generates a sense of melancholy. Yet this compositional excess invites us to immerse ourselves in the image and enjoy the richly designed audiovisual material, but it also asks us to step out of it and connect it with our historical present. The formal surplus here addresses a concrete historical question – the absence of utopia – by articulating a belief in the image’s capacity to challenge the reality outside the diegesis. It would not be overreaching to suggest that the difficulty in classifying Angelopoulos derives from the fact that, from the beginning until the end of his career, his films communicate a firm belief in cinema as a medium of com- munication. As most of this volume’s contributors acknowledge, Angelopoulos extenuated the formal experiments that were initially introduced to the medium in the 1960s. It is perhaps because of this belatedness that he did not subscribe to facile and at times repetitive postmodern critiques of the image. When he started making feature films in the 1970s the belatedness of introduction 9 his style was more apparent due to the temporal proximity to the 1960s, while by the 1980s and 1990s he appeared as a marginal figure within a postmodern cinematic landscape: a living anachronism. Angelopoulos was a firm believer in art cinema as a specific mode of aesthetic production, and perhaps this is another important reason why he has been ignored by Anglophone film criticism. For many years, the very term ‘art cinema’ has been a dirty word within Anglophone film studies. As Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover observe, the cultural studies turn and the embrace of postclassical film theory are the two main reasons why, following the 1990s, little attention has been paid to rethinking art cinema as an aesthetic category (2010: 5). Furthermore, from the 1990s onwards, formal questions had lost their connection to political issues and there was an assumption that art cinema stood for a dead end formalism, which was not grounded in the nexus between form, politics and history. It was therefore a reflexive action on the part of cultural studies scholars to dismiss art cinema as ‘elitist’ and ‘bourgeois’. This was strengthened by what W. J. T. Mitchell describes as ‘the democratic or level- ling fantasy’ (2002: 172), according to which postmodernism has diminished the boundaries between high art and mass culture. The paradox, however, is that this thesis was not inclusive, since on the one hand it led to the legitimi- sation of objects produced for mass consumption, but on the other hand art cinema was summarily dismissed as a retrograde category. In Angelopoulos’ case, his persistence in the art-cinematic project was directly interrelated with a desire to use cinema as visual testimony to his country’s history. Prior to making his first feature film he stated the need to follow the path laid by the Cinema Novo filmmakers and make films that stand as ‘testimonies on a specific topographical space’ (cited in Rafailidis 2003: 153). It is therefore no accident that, as mentioned in the beginning of this introduction, his work has influenced filmmakers in countries such as China, Iran, Brazil, Bolivia and in Europe, who also wished to address the troubling historical legacy of their countries. This is particularly important since filmmakers such as Nelson Pereira dos Santos5 and Jorge Sanjinés, who have openly acknowledged Angelopoulos’ influence (see Hanlon 2010: 352; Leontis 2005), are part of the Third Cinema tradition, which has been defined in opposition to Eurocentric models of filmmaking. Equally important is to acknowledge that Japan was the largest market for his films. This speaks volumes about their ability to resonate with audiences around the world. It is fair to suggest that Jacque Rivette’s view that Kenji Mizoguchi’s cinema (a filmmaker whom Angelopoulos admired during his youth) speaks the familiar language of mise en scène, equally applies to Angelopoulos’ oeuvre (cited in Bordwell 1997b: 79). The third and perhaps most important reason why Angelopoulos’ films have not received the critical attention they deserve has to do with the fact that they are deeply imbricated in modern Greek history. As Fredric Jameson says 10 angelos koutsourakis and mark steven in his contribution to this book, ‘Greece has gone through a collective experience of which most other modern nations have only known bits and pieces’. While Angelopoulos’ films engage history on a global scale, Greece nonetheless remains his oeuvre’s centre of gravity, and it is also the geopolitical site of historical misunderstanding. What is difficult about these films is to hear their historically specific echoes. For these historical echoes to be audible, a historical overview is required that might help the reader and any prospective viewers of Angelopoulos’ films.6

THE ECHOES OF MODERN GREEK HISTORY

1. World War I Wolfram Schütte suggests that Angelopoulos along with Luchino Visconti, Carlos Saura and Andrzej Wajda are the four main European filmmakers whose national history is instrumental in understanding the political, aesthetic and historical consequences of their works (1992: 10). Angelopoulos’ films are preoccupied with the tormented history of Greek modernity, a history of internal political and social conflict, and foreign intervention in the country’s internal affairs. Yet while his films explore historical incidents from the late 1920s to the present, these historical conflicts date back to the beginning of the twentieth century, and the years before World War I, which saw the country split into different political camps. Before entering World War I Greece was divided. On the one hand, the royalist camp supported neutrality while the republicans, led by Eleftherios Venizelos, were pro-Entente. In August 1916, the ‘National Defence’ led by the Venizelists staged a coup to challenge the King, Constantine I. By October 1916 the national schism widened, since Venizelos had set up a provisional government based in Thessaloniki and the country was thus divided both geographically and politi- cally. In November 1916, Allied forces and Venizelists fought against the Greek army controlled by the King. By 30 May 1917, the King was dethroned and, on 14 June, Venizelos became the Prime Minister of a reunited Greece. By the end of June, Greece joined the Allied forces against the Central Powers.

2. After the War: the Asia Minor Catastrophe In November 1918 the Socialist Labour Party of Greece (SEKE) was founded and it opposed the approaching war led by the Allies against the declining Ottoman Empire. Venizelos and the Republicans supported the Greek nationalist expansion widely known as Μεγάλη Ιδέα (Great Idea) and, on 15 May 1919, the Greek army (with support from Allied forces) landed in Smyrna, introduction 11 which was Ottoman territory at the time. This episode revived Turkish nationalism led by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. The following year, on 10 August 1920, the Treaty of Sèvres was ratified and territories of the former Ottoman Empire were removed by the Allies. The humiliating terms of the treaty intensified an already existing Turkish nationalism. In the Greek elections that took place the same year, the royalists took power after an electorate campaign that supported the withdrawal of troops from Asia Minor. Ignoring their election promises, the royalists continued the Greek offensive in Turkish territories, while they also restored, with a dubious plebiscite, King Constantine I who was not regarded favourably by the Allies. By the end of August 1922, the Turkish nationalists had defeated the demoralised Greek army. Large numbers of the Greek and Armenian populations were slaughtered and a wave of refugees flooded the country (Agamemnon’s five-minute monologue in The Travelling Players refers to these events). Following a peace treaty between Greece and Turkey, which was signed in 1923 in Lausanne, the two countries agreed to exchange populations so as to prevent future territorial conflicts. An estimated number of 1,220,000 Greeks and 45,000 Armenians left Asia Minor and Eastern Thrace to be placed in Greece, and 519,000 Muslims evacuated from Greece were relocated in Turkey.

3. The Years After the Asia Minor Catastrophe and Metaxas Dictatorship The majority of refugees joined either the Socialist Labour Party of Greece (in 1924 it changed its name to the Communist Party) or republican anti-royalist parties, and they also played an important role in trade unionist activities. These refugees suffered long-term discrimination while providing cheap labour during the country’s industrialisation in the early 1920s. Following the Asia Minor debacle, Venizelist officers led by Nikolaos Plastiras staged a military coup. King Constantine resigned and was succeeded by King George II. In October 1922, five former government officials and a General Officer were executed for their role in the Asia Minor catastrophe. In 1924, the institution of monarchy was abolished. The 1920s comprised a period of political instability that included Theodoros Pangalos’ dictatorship from 1925 to 26 while they were also marked by fierce political opposition between the Venizelists and the Populist Party. In the 1928 elections, the Communist Party managed to elect 10 MPs. After the Great Depression in 1929 there was growing industrial arrest between 1924 and 1934; this led to the increase of Communist Party membership. In 1929 Venizelos’ government, with the support of the right- wing anti-Venizelists, voted in the Idionym Law, which penalised those who instigated industrial disputes. Thousands of Communist Party sympathisers were deported to islands, hundreds were imprisoned and tortured and many 12 angelos koutsourakis and mark steven were murdered. On 25 November 1935, King George II was restored and he then called elections on 26 January 1936. None of the parties managed to form a majority and the previous Prime Minister, Konstantinos Demertzis, continued to run the government until 13 April 1936, when he died suddenly and was succeeded by Ioannis Metaxas. Metaxas took advantage of the political crisis and by 4 August 1936 had formed a dictatorship with the blessing of the two main political parties. Angelopoulos’ second feature, Days of ’36 takes place within this period. Metaxas was an admirer of Mussolini and Hitler and his regime persecuted brutally any form of political opposition including communists, trade-unionists and moderate republicans.

3. World War II and Civil War Despite his fascist sympathies, Metaxas rejected an ultimatum on 28 October 1940 to allow the Italian army to enter Greek territories and so Greece entered the war against the Axis forces. The Greek army successfully pushed the Italians back into Albania and this was hailed as one of the first military tri- umphs against the fascist alliance. On 6 April 1941 the German army invaded Greece, which was now supported by British, Australian and New Zealand forces. On 27 April, Athens fell and Greece was officially under occupation. The Axis forces plundered the country’s resources and one of the consequences was a major famine in the winter of 1941–2 during which more than 100,000 people died. On 27 September 1941 the National Liberation Front (EAM) was founded mainly by members of the Communist Party. This was the political wing of a mass resistance movement; its military division was the National People’s Liberation Army (ELAS), which inflicted important blows on the occupying forces. EAM was enthusiastically joined by young people and women who were attracted to its campaigns of solidarity across the country as well as by the way it linked the fight against the Axis forces to a fight for social justice. The British collaborated with EAM and ELAS to fight the Germans but they were simultaneously apprehensive of the communists’ popularity. This was the reason why they took steps during the war to enforce a government of national unity, which would come to power by the end of the warfare and enfeeble the communist influence. During the war there was already tension between the EAM/ELAS and Nazi collaborators, such as Organisation X led by Georgios Grivas. These ten- sions intensified following the end of the war, when the British proceeded to collaborate with their former enemies against EAM/ELAS. One of the major incidents of the time was τα Δεκεμβριανά – the December–January 1944–5 battle of Athens that started when British soldiers and former Greek Hitler sympathisers opened fire against the pro-partisan crowd (this is shown in The Travelling Players) killing twenty-eight people. The Guardian has recently introduction 13 published an article describing this as ‘Britain’s Dirty Secret’ (Smith,Vulliamy 2014). The battle between the Greek partisans and the British and Greek Nazi collaborationists lasted until 6 January 1945. On 12 February 1945, EAM signed the Varkiza agreement and committed to disarm in exchange for amnesty, an ambiguous decision that still preoccupies his- torians (there is a scene of ELAS’ disarmament in The Travelling Players). In the following elections that took place on 31 March the Communist Party abstained. Meanwhile the People’s Party government, led by Dino Tsaldaris, restored the monarchy. The years of 1945–6 are now known as the years of the White Terror, since the promises of political amnesty were not kept and the EAM/ELAS partisans were brutally persecuted by former Nazi collaborators. In October 1946, the communists announced the foundation of the Democratic Army and from December 1947 the Communist Party was made illegal. The Democratic Army took to the mountains and the third phase of the Greek Civil War started (The Travelling Players and The Weeping Meadow dedicate significant screen time to the traumas of the Civil War). In March 1947, Harry Truman convinced the US congress to provide military and economic aid to Greece so as to prevent communist expansion. Britain was nearly bankrupt and decided to withdraw. The Truman doctrine was thus decisive for the outcome of the Civil War, which ended by 1949 with the defeat of the Democratic Army. Some Communists managed to escape to the countries of the Eastern Bloc (such as Spyros [Manos Katrakis] in Voyage to Cythera and Heleni [Irène Jacob] in The Dust of Time) and were only given amnesty during the 1980s after the election of PASOK (a Greek Socialist Democratic Party) to government. However, following the end of the Civil War, most of the communists, left-wing sympathisers and resistance fighters were prosecuted. Many were deported to concentration camps on islands such as Makronisos and Gyaros, where they were tortured and forced to sign declarations of repentance (there are references to these concentration camps in The Travelling Players and in The Hunters).7 Greece was thus one of the few European countries that not only failed to acknowledge the antifascist struggle of its people but it also had post-war experience of concentration camps, which were funded by its Western allies.

4. After the Civil War and the Military Junta of 1967 The end of the Civil War found Greece divided. After the warfare, the post-civil war government’s reliance on American economic and military aid turned Greece into a US-client state. In 1952 Greece joined NATO and the American influence was consolidated. In the elections of 1958, EDA (United Democratic Left), which was the political front for the banned Communist Party, secured 28 per cent of the vote and became the leading party of the opposition. This result caused scepticism in the army and among the 14 angelos koutsourakis and mark steven political elites who responded by strengthening the so-called shadow-state (παρακράτος), a network of policemen, army officers and gangs of lumpen thugs who suppressed civil rights so as to reduce the leftist influence on the political landscape. One of their most notorious activities was the assassination of the left-wing politician, Grigorios Lambrakis, on 22 May 1963 (Lambrakis’ assassination is represented in The Hunters). By the mid-1960s the main actors in parliament were the right-wing Populist Party (ERE) led by Konstantinos Karamanlis and the Centrist Party led by George Papandreou. In 1965, a political crisis between the Prime Minister, George Papandreou and King Constantine II led to political instability that lasted for two years (in The Hunters there are references to this period in a scene that shows shadow-state thugs attacking members of the EDA in an election rally). The fact that some members of the Centrist Party considered a post-electoral coalition with the Left caused alarm in the army, which under US support staged a coup d’état on 21 April 1967. For seven years the country experienced heavy political repression while imprisonment, torture and deportation of political dissidents were part of the regime’s tactics. On 14 November 1973 students at the Athens Polytechnic, influenced by the 1960s’ movements and the May of 1968, staged a massive demonstration against the regime, which was suppressed, with bloodshed, by the army three days later. In 1974, the colonels tried to stage another coup d’état in Cyprus and overthrow the democratically elected President Makarios. This gave Turkey the pretext for invading the island, which as a result of that invasion was eventually divided into two. The political crisis that ensued forced the colonels to resign and parliamentary democracy was thus restored.

5. After the Junta and into the Twenty-first Century After a plebiscite held on 8 December 1975 the voting populace rejected the restoration of the monarchy. The right-wing party, New Democracy, led by Konstantinos Karamanlis, won the first two elections held in 1974 and 1977 respectively. Karamanlis’ government legalised the Communist Party, which participated in the elections from 1974 onwards. In 1981 the Socialist Democratic Party PASOK led by Andreas Papandreou won the elections and worked to alle- viate the Civil War traumas. In 17 August 1982 the government recognised the national resistance led by EAM and ELAS. A year earlier Greece had joined the European Communities (the precursor to the European Union). PASOK ruled the country until 1989 pushing reforms that would restore the social fabric. Yet these years were marked by a depoliticisation that was intensified by the popu- lation’s turn towards consumerism as well as by political scandals, favouritism and political corruption. The second period in Angelopoulos’ oeuvre and particularly films like Voyage to Cythera and The Beekeeper echo this political stag- introduction 15 nancy. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and subsequent to the Third Balkan War, Greece was overwhelmed with refugees from the former socialist states and from states devastated by civil war. The Suspended Step of the Stork and Ulysses’ Gaze dwell on these geopolitical changes, while in Eternity and a Day the question of borders becomes an existentialist metaphor for the historical disillu- sionments within the temporal structures of late modernity. In 2009, fears of a sovereign debt crisis and, one year later, a conditional loan of €110 billion from the Eurozone and IMF lead to the imposition of severe austerity measures, which were met with civil unrest. This situation and its political backlash were to have been the focus of Angelopoulos’ unfinished film, The Other Sea. From this brief overview of Greece’s modern history we can understand that it is a country variously marked by the trauma of foreign intervention, military coups, class struggle, civil war and migration. We can thus appreci- ate Angelopoulos’ formal interrogation of Greece’s history as a cinematic and historiographic project. Another aspect that invites further attention is that, despite recent developments in the field that tend to concentrate on discus- sions of world or global cinema, one cannot completely disregard the nation. We do not intend to return to questions of national cinemas, but to point out that film scholarship needs to engage with concrete historical facts instead of treating history as an abstract theoretical concept. This relates intrinsically to Willemen’s argument that it is not sufficient to study World Cinema applying the official Euro-American theory and ‘ignore the specific knowledges that may be at work in a text’ (2006: 35).

SYNOPSIS

This book is divided into four sections, each comprising multiple chapters that deploy a specific critical approach to various aspects of Angelopoulos’ cinema: these sections are concerned respectively with authorship, with politics, with poetics, and with time. Before summarising the individual chapters, it will be important to emphasise that the critical approaches taken up in these sections are not exhaustive and that the thematic categories are far from exclusive. Rather, these sections have been designed to emphasise points of continuity between the chapters, so that each section might convey a specific narrative about Angelopoulos and his cinema. These separate narratives overlap significantly, not least because their areas of focus are all layered within a cumulative object of study, the director’s oeuvre, from which it is impossible to completely separate any one element. The first section, on authorship, is interested in the formation of Angelopoulos as an auteur, and its chapters demonstrate the formative relationships between his evolving aesthetic and the work of other artists. 16 angelos koutsourakis and mark steven

Maria Chalkou provides a detailed survey of Angelopoulos’ work as a film critic, demonstrating the various ways in which the director was personally, professionally, intellectually and aesthetically invested in cinema even before stepping into the role of filmmaker. Chalkou’s essay ‘attempts to throw light upon unknown aspects of his cinéphile background; to trace critical attitudes, emerging ideas, early tastes, and unexplored influences; and to consider how his criticism relates to his eventual ideas on cinema and filmmaking practices’. She not only shows how wide-ranging Angelopoulos’ taste in film really was, she also demonstrates how several of the features that would define Angelopoulos’ own aesthetic output emerged from his cinéphilic predilections and critical style. The late Nagisa Oshima provides a unique perspective on Angelopoulos, approaching his work from the standpoint of a contemporary auteur and directorial colleague. The first of his two short essays reflects upon several meetings with Angelopoulos, and the second provides a filmmaker’s appraisal of Angelopoulos’ technical accomplishments. Oshima tentatively attributes their friendship ‘to the similarity in approach we feel our films take, but it is also thanks to Theo’s love for talking. Or, we could even say love for giving speeches’. Hamish Ford then situates Angelopoulos within the compositional context of post-war cinematic modernism. He finds it productive to think about Angelopoulos in relation to Michelangelo Antonioni because, he insists, ‘through their work we can chart the complex development of European feature film modernism itself’. If Antonioni is one of Angelopoulos’ major inspirations, then another source of formative energy is found in the work of Bertolt Brecht. Angelos Koutsourakis ‘aims to clarify the often hinted at but not theoretically qualified Brechtian aspect of Angelopoulos’ cinema’, and he does so by reading Angelopoulos’ 1970s films with an eye for Brechtian forms and tropes, focusing specifically on the Brechtian concept of Gestus and its application within the filmic medium. Closing this first section, Robert Sinnerbrink explores how, in Ulysses’ Gaze, Angelopoulos strives to ‘combine history, myth, and politics in ways that constitute a cinema of historical experience, collective memory, and ethical responsiveness’. For Sinnerbrink, who emphasises a critical thought that underwrites the chapters by Ford and Koutsourakis, Angelopoulos’ methods here are paradigmatically modernist. The second section, on politics, is interested in the various ways that Angelopoulos’ cinema evolved in relation to his political commitments and in response to the vicissitudes of modern history. Fredric Jameson’s chapter explores the role of collective narrative in Angelopoulos’ films from the 1970s. It begins from the premise that ‘our failure to grant Theo Angelopoulos the position he deserves in modern cinema’ stems from the fact that modern Greek history remains ‘far less familiar than that of the Western European countries’. According to Jameson, ‘Greece has gone through a collective experience of which most other modern nations have only known bits and pieces’, and introduction 17 his essay explores some of the ways that Angelopoulos depicts this experience as a kind of modern epic. Also looking at films from the 1970s, Vrasidas Karalis discusses the various ways that Angelopoulos forged a cinema of ‘demys- tification’, whose individual films, argues Karalis, ‘contested history as the justifying discourse of power and authority, and critically recentred crucial elements of historical knowledge in order to offer a new critical language of how power functions in the public sphere and on the mental construction of contemporary subjectivity’. Dan Georgakas then focuses on Megalexandros, which was released in 1980 and which is generally considered to emblematise a moment of political disenchantment for the director. Alternatively, Georgakas views the film as an expression of political transition, in which Angelopoulos’ sympathies shifted from state socialism and party politics to anarchism or anarcho- communism. ‘Megalexandros’, he argues, ‘rather than simply being abstractly anti-authoritarian or anti-Stalinist, affirms a non-coercive pathway to the socialist future’. The final chapter in the second section, by Mark Steven, leaps forward to the very end of Angelopoulos’ career. This chapter argues that the director’s late style mediates a political response to the ascent of neoliberalism in Europe and especially in Greece. For Steven, Angelopoulos’ ‘late style is equally a response to its unresolvable material conditions as it is to the oeuvre from which it evolved’. The third section, on poetics, is interested in the evolution of particular forms and how they are deployed narratively. Julian Murphet accounts for one of the director’s technical signatures, ‘the long-take circular or semi-circular pan in long shot, stretching from between 180° and 720°’, which he describes ‘as the great auteur’s most distinctive device for dynamic group framing.’ According to Murphet, when Angelopoulos uses the panning shot he is deploying ‘cinema’s most trenchant shorthand for the totality as such: a camera movement whose logic is not self-regarding but self-effacing, committed to opening up the space that surrounds the frame, dismantling the fourth wall, and disintegrating the privileged position of the spectator’. Caroline Eades charts the development of what she calls the ‘narrative imperative’ through Angelopoulos’ films. In her argument, this imperative manifests structurally when the director submits ‘the function and signification of images, mise en scène, even music, to the advancement of the plot, the characterisation of its protagonists, and the construction of a diegetic world’. Locally, however, Eades also finds the narrative imperative as a driving force behind the numerous explicit references to Greek tragedy and Homeric epic. Dany Nobus and Nektaria Pouli write exclusively on Voyage to Cythera, from 1984, arguing that it ‘constitutes a creative hinge in Angelopoulos’ career’, whereby an indi- viduating and ultimately humanising ‘re-calibration of creative effort applied as much to the characters in his films as it did to himself, as the director of the films’ characters’. Stephanie Hemelryk Donald analyses another crucial aspect 18 angelos koutsourakis and mark steven of Angelopoulos’ characterology as it plays out in Landscape in the Mist, from 1988: namely, his depiction of children. In Donald’s view, children express a unique vitality within the filmic apparatus: ‘The adult world is dangerous to them, possibly fatally so. Nevertheless it has no capacity to progress without their energy and their will’. Helping us segue into the book’s final section, Sylvie Rollet charts a formal dialectic as it plays out through Angelopoulos’ later films, arguing that here ‘the historical stage is treated as a psychic scene. The “liberal democratic consensus” rests upon the repression of conflict, so the mourning of combat and revolutionary dreams are forbidden. What is repressed can only return in a spectral form’. While Rollet’s argument is tonally philosophical, it nonetheless directs its questions at what she calls a ‘poetics of form’, probing the way that these spectral returns emerge ‘through the images, the sounds, and the narrative’. The fourth and final section, on time, is interested in the temporal thematic that Angelopoulos pursued for the duration of his career, usually in relation to memory and memorialisation. Richard Rushton uses the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze to chart the transition between the ‘politics’ of Angelopoulos’ early films and the ‘humanism’ of his later work, a distinction that several other chapters also discuss. For Rushton, however, Deleuze’s concept of the ‘time- image’ provides a means of distinguishing between two aesthetic modalities by way of their articulations of the past, of time and of memory. ‘The key distinction,’ he argues, ‘is between what Deleuze calls a recollection-image, and that which he terms pure recollection. While the early films are constructed by way of recollection-images, the later films offer what Deleuze calls pure recollection.’ Taking up the idea of recollection, for Smaro Kamboureli cultural memory creates virtual spaces in which ‘different temporalities’ are brought together and ‘experienced simultaneously’. Kamboureli takes up Jacques Derrida’s concept of ‘archive fever’ to explore this aspect of cultural memory in Ulysses Gaze. In her view, the film compulsively returns to its historical antecedents, but in doing so it confronts the countervailing logic, that ‘the archive never fully yields its secrets’. Asbjørn Grønstad accounts for the final film Angelopoulos made,The Dust of Time, as an apotheosis to the director’s visual investment in duration. ‘It would seem,’ argues Grønstad, ‘that the tem- porality of history is couched in opacity, whereas the work of memory strug- gles to bring a sense of lucidity to the past, to past experience, and, finally, to the experience of the past in the present.’ For Angelopoulos, he argues, this sense of memory is to be thought of in relation to a decisively visual imagina- tion: ‘Images,’ writes Grønstad, ‘play a pivotal role in this memory work . . .’ Concluding this book is an afterward by Andrew Horton, who in addition to being a recognised expert on Angelopoulos could also consider the director as both a friend and colleague. Horton’s afterward presents the first critical account of Angelopoulos’ final, unfinished film, The Other Sea. Horton was introduction 19 on the film’s set only a week before Angelopoulos was fatally struck down by a motorcycle, and had been following closely the development of this project, providing suggestions for the final version of the script. Here he considers this unrealised film as the capstone to a long career, arguing that it would have syn- thesised many of the lifelong concerns and stylistic singularities that defined Angelopoulos’ oeuvre.

NOTES

1. Kaige was a member of the jury at the 1998 Cannes film festival that wardeda Angelopoulos the Palme d’Or for Eternity and a Day. He confessed to Angelopoulos that he managed to watch special screenings of a smuggled copy of The Travelling Players in China during the late 1970s. The film exercised a fundamental influence on his career. 2. Bertolucci has acknowledged Angelopoulos’ influence in his epic 1900 (1976) and he maintained that despite their similarities, The Travelling Players was a better film, see (Horton 1980: 15). 3. Let us here state that we accept David Bordwell’s periodisation (Bordwell 2005: 143) and we consider Megalexandros to be the logical extension of the three films that preceded it (Days of ’36, The Travelling Players and The Hunters). The reason for this is that despite the film’s pessimistic tenor, history is still treated as a learning process (albeit ex negativo) and as Angelopoulos has stated it is after this film that he abandoned the view of ‘ “History” with capital “H” ’ (cited in Horton 1997b: 109). Let us state that not all the scholars in this book share this viewpoint. 4. Of course there are a number of important articles and book chapters on his early films (Tarr, Proppe 1976; Wilson 1975; Samardzija 2006), as well as numerous book chapters focusing on the late period of his oeuvre (Everett 2004; Rutherford 2002; Eleftheriotis 2010; Calotychos 2013; Stathi 2013), but overall the critical interest does not justify Angelopoulos’ importance in the history of World Cinema. 5. This is also noteworthy given that dos Santos started making films twenty years before Angelopoulos, but he has acknowledged the latter’s influence upon his later films. 6. To summarise the historical facts, we have consulted the following books: David H. Close, The Origins of the Greek Civil War; Vasilis Rafailidis, Ιστορία (κωμικοτραγική) του Νεοελληνικού Kράτους; Richard Clogg, A Concise History of Greece; John S. Koliopoulos, Thanos M. Veremis, Modern Greece: A History Since 1821. 7. Few people outside Greece know about the existence of these post-war concentration camps and it is surprising that the Anglophone resources on the History of Greece we have consulted do not mention anything about them.