Theo Angelopoulos (pictured below) was hit and killed by a motorcyclist on 24 January, as this now final collection of his work was readied. The films of this 76-year-old Palme d’Or-winner (for 1998’s Eternity and a Day, included) wrestled with the tragic recent history of his native Greece and Balkans at sometimes notorious, slowly unfolding length. An old-time maestro aspiring to novelistic depth, he lured Willem Dafoe, Michel Piccoli, Bruno Ganz and Irene Jacob to his unintended swansong, 2008’s The Dust of Time (unreleased in the UK in any form till now). These DVDs are an elegy to the 20th-century tyrannies and hopes he watched expire.
Ulysses’ Gaze (1995) was buoyed by Harvey Keitel’s post-Tarantino starring role as a Greek-American director pursuing the lost, first reels of film shot in the Balkans in 1905: the footage’s precious “captured gaze” at people swept up and drowned by history could be Angelopoulos’s own. As Keitel nears the heart of contemporary Balkan darkness in Sarajevo, past and present coexist, Bulgarian secret police arresting Greeks for the Nazis standing in the shadows of current border guards. Trilogy: The Weeping Meadow (2004) and The Dust of Time trace decades of persecution and displacement through the love affair of Eleni and Spyros, who elope from a riverside village of Ottoman refugees, and spend 50 years wading back to each other against history’s tide.
This romance shows Angelopoulos’s tendency to almost soapy melodrama, alongside surreal tableaux – the ferrying downriver of a giant, glowering stone Lenin from post-Ceaucescu Bucharest – grandiose language, and sometimes hollowly mystical grace-notes. Questionable decisions are redeemed in The Dust of Time, for instance, by the richly experienced humanity of Piccoli, Ganz and Jacob’s characters, seeing out their century in 1999 Berlin, ghosts of Siberian gulags in their eyes. As a violently stopped voice is mourned, treasure these unparalleled, gripping achievements.
Watch the trailer for Ulysses' Gaze
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