A modern odyssey (literally)

A modern odyssey (literally)

A modern odyssey (literally)

A modern odyssey (literally)

Angelopoulos's work fascinates me. I think he'll become my favorite director along with David Lynch if I continue to enjoy his filmography as much. This director, hidden in the fog of European cinema, presents here a story full of sadness and lost glances, the story of a director who embarks on a journey into nostalgia and memory, in search of three lost film reels, a love letter to cinema from one of the most brilliant filmmakers in history.

Thank you, Theo. Even though you're labeled pretentious, boring, and pedantic, you've delivered the most beautiful images I've seen in years.

That patience of an old master, that poetry that exudes a profound love of cinema, of telling stories; you send yourself to search for those lost reels, that first glance, the innocence in those eyes, and you give us a nostalgic odyssey through memory. through the conflicts that have plagued your Balkans for over a hundred years. Few adore the image like you do, pure visuality, as a container of the idea, a transmitter of the symbolic, and a support of the poetic.

The first images of the film correspond to four shots filmed by the Manakis brothers in 1905, capturing the work of a group of spinners, and which could be the first film shot in the Balkans. But is this really the first film, the "first look" that Greek cinema casts on the world? asks the protagonist's voiceover. A fade-in leads to a sequence narrating the death of Yannakis Manakis and where A learns of the possible existence of three undeveloped reels, a film that predates the spinners' film. A short sequence but one of great narrative complexity where different temporalities meet and blend seamlessly, one of the filmmaker's hallmarks.

Thus, the material objective of the journey is proposed: to find those hypothetical reels. This is not an archaeological endeavor. What matters is not so much the discovery of a historical document as the recovery of a lost, original, supposedly innocent gaze: a possible primordial gaze on which to base a new beginning in order to avoid the disastrous mistakes made since then. The historical need to recover that gaze coincides with A's personal need to recover his own gaze, which he lost next to the Temple of Apollo, when he realized that he was incapable of understanding, that everything had ceased to make sense to him, that reality was nothing more than an immense black void, just as his camera captured it. A believes that if he recovers that original gaze from his country's cinema, he will also be able to recover his own lost gaze.

The Manakis' images are a model of the pure, uncontaminated image, whose latent state, still undeveloped, guarantees that they have not been used for any spurious purpose. A wants to recover the images of the past and search within them for a new way of understanding life.

The project, therefore, has a double dimension: it is a spatial quest following the physical path that the Manakis film may have followed, but it is also a quest in time, an inner journey of the protagonist through the imaginary topography of his memory.

***WATCHED WITH JDGM***

Theo Angelopoulos Ranked

Angelopoulos's work fascinates me. I think he'll become my favorite director along with David Lynch if I continue to enjoy his filmography as much. This director, hidden in the fog of European cinema, presents here a story full of sadness and lost glances, the story of a director who embarks on a journey into nostalgia and memory, in search of three lost film reels, a love letter to cinema from one of the most brilliant filmmakers in history.

Thank you, Theo. Even though you're labeled pretentious, boring, and pedantic, you've delivered the most beautiful images I've seen in years.

That patience of an old master, that poetry that exudes a profound love of cinema, of telling stories; you send yourself to search for those lost reels, that first glance, the innocence in those eyes, and you give us a nostalgic odyssey through memory. through the conflicts that have plagued your Balkans for over a hundred years. Few adore the image like you do, pure visuality, as a container of the idea, a transmitter of the symbolic, and a support of the poetic.

The first images of the film correspond to four shots filmed by the Manakis brothers in 1905, capturing the work of a group of spinners, and which could be the first film shot in the Balkans. But is this really the first film, the "first look" that Greek cinema casts on the world? asks the protagonist's voiceover. A fade-in leads to a sequence narrating the death of Yannakis Manakis and where A learns of the possible existence of three undeveloped reels, a film that predates the spinners' film. A short sequence but one of great narrative complexity where different temporalities meet and blend seamlessly, one of the filmmaker's hallmarks.

Thus, the material objective of the journey is proposed: to find those hypothetical reels. This is not an archaeological endeavor. What matters is not so much the discovery of a historical document as the recovery of a lost, original, supposedly innocent gaze: a possible primordial gaze on which to base a new beginning in order to avoid the disastrous mistakes made since then. The historical need to recover that gaze coincides with A's personal need to recover his own gaze, which he lost next to the Temple of Apollo, when he realized that he was incapable of understanding, that everything had ceased to make sense to him, that reality was nothing more than an immense black void, just as his camera captured it. A believes that if he recovers that original gaze from his country's cinema, he will also be able to recover his own lost gaze.

The Manakis' images are a model of the pure, uncontaminated image, whose latent state, still undeveloped, guarantees that they have not been used for any spurious purpose. A wants to recover the images of the past and search within them for a new way of understanding life.

The project, therefore, has a double dimension: it is a spatial quest following the physical path that the Manakis film may have followed, but it is also a quest in time, an inner journey of the protagonist through the imaginary topography of his memory.

***WATCHED WITH JDGM***

Theo Angelopoulos Ranked

oh man

oh man

Of the great directors who emerged from the (what I would call) post-Tarkovskyan era of cinema in the late eighties, who leant heavier on lyricism than ever before, and who played with filmic time more than ever before, - that is, Tarr, Wenders, Kieślowski, Kiarostami, Wong etc - Angelopoulos is for me by far the most challenging. (I apologise for again mentioning Tarkovsky in an Angelopoulos review and promise never to do it again). His films aren’t just elusive in and of themselves; they are specifically reliant on this elusiveness to forward their overarching themes and ideas. The foundation on which his Borders Trilogy is built is the elusiveness surrounding these arbitrary notions of binary borders (borders separating countries, borders separating people, and borders separating persons). They are films specifically about being lost, the humanness of being lost, unity and division and the space in-between. And additionally, this lostness, as it were, is presented not only on a purely physical, surface level, but also on a metaphysical level. It is just as much about the concretes of physical lostness as it is about the abstracts of memory, time, history, politics, love, and identity. To watch an Angelopoulos film is to willingly put oneself into a state of lostness. It is an act of aimlessly groping in the mist for the things we thought we were sure of. Naturally, thus, his films are challenging. The imagery is on one hand very singular (it’s not imagery of fire or water or something general, it’s imagery of a pointing finger being lifted out of the water by a helicopter and flown over the city, or imagery of a dying horse in the middle of the street), but is on the other hand utterly indefinite. It makes for this mixture between impressions and meaning which only further thickens the fog for the audience.

Ulysses’ Gaze in particular is not Angelopoulos’ best film. The casting of Harvey Keitel was a strange and ultimately slightly unconvincing choice. A lot happens in the film which just feels so removed from either plot or theme that you wonder why it’s there, and certain developments in the narrative occur without much, well, development. There just doesn’t really seem to be as much of a whole as would be necessary to make this the masterpiece which the trilogy’s other two films are. But at the end of the day this is an Angelopoulos film, and therefore this is an immensely beautiful film. There are certain moments which just floor you. They cease to even feel like parts of the film anymore, and operate as separate entities. The scene which takes us through five years of flashbacks in one shot in one room, our protagonist, standing on a boat which carries a dismembered statue of Lenin, literally riding on the delusion that life and history perhaps aren’t irrevocable. The scene where he drops off an old woman in the middle of a town square she hasn’t been in for fifty years, a place that has become foreign to her, and with a wide angle lens to emphasise distance, the camera tracks backwards to show her standing in her wasteland. Even the opening scene itself. There is something so stirring about it all, something so wonderfully ungraspable, something beautifully tangible, still yet fervent at the same time. I can’t say that this film is a total success, but its beauty speaks for itself.

Of the great directors who emerged from the (what I would call) post-Tarkovskyan era of cinema in the late eighties, who leant heavier on lyricism than ever before, and who played with filmic time more than ever before, - that is, Tarr, Wenders, Kieślowski, Kiarostami, Wong etc - Angelopoulos is for me by far the most challenging. (I apologise for again mentioning Tarkovsky in an Angelopoulos review and promise never to do it again). His films aren’t just elusive in and of themselves; they are specifically reliant on this elusiveness to forward their overarching themes and ideas. The foundation on which his Borders Trilogy is built is the elusiveness surrounding these arbitrary notions of binary borders (borders separating countries, borders separating people, and borders separating persons). They are films specifically about being lost, the humanness of being lost, unity and division and the space in-between. And additionally, this lostness, as it were, is presented not only on a purely physical, surface level, but also on a metaphysical level. It is just as much about the concretes of physical lostness as it is about the abstracts of memory, time, history, politics, love, and identity. To watch an Angelopoulos film is to willingly put oneself into a state of lostness. It is an act of aimlessly groping in the mist for the things we thought we were sure of. Naturally, thus, his films are challenging. The imagery is on one hand very singular (it’s not imagery of fire or water or something general, it’s imagery of a pointing finger being lifted out of the water by a helicopter and flown over the city, or imagery of a dying horse in the middle of the street), but is on the other hand utterly indefinite. It makes for this mixture between impressions and meaning which only further thickens the fog for the audience.

Ulysses’ Gaze in particular is not Angelopoulos’ best film. The casting of Harvey Keitel was a strange and ultimately slightly unconvincing choice. A lot happens in the film which just feels so removed from either plot or theme that you wonder why it’s there, and certain developments in the narrative occur without much, well, development. There just doesn’t really seem to be as much of a whole as would be necessary to make this the masterpiece which the trilogy’s other two films are. But at the end of the day this is an Angelopoulos film, and therefore this is an immensely beautiful film. There are certain moments which just floor you. They cease to even feel like parts of the film anymore, and operate as separate entities. The scene which takes us through five years of flashbacks in one shot in one room, our protagonist, standing on a boat which carries a dismembered statue of Lenin, literally riding on the delusion that life and history perhaps aren’t irrevocable. The scene where he drops off an old woman in the middle of a town square she hasn’t been in for fifty years, a place that has become foreign to her, and with a wide angle lens to emphasise distance, the camera tracks backwards to show her standing in her wasteland. Even the opening scene itself. There is something so stirring about it all, something so wonderfully ungraspable, something beautifully tangible, still yet fervent at the same time. I can’t say that this film is a total success, but its beauty speaks for itself.