Theo Angelopoulos

6.4 Reconstruction (1970)
6.4 The Days of '36 (1972)
8.6 Travelling Players (1975)
6.4 The Hunters (1977)
6.7 Alexander the Great (1980)
7.2 Voyage to Cythera (1984)
8.2 The Beekeeper (1986)
8.5 Landscape In The Mist (1988)
7.8 The Suspended Step of the Stork (1991)
7.5 Ulysses' Gaze (1995)
7.5 Eternity And A Day (1998)
7.7 The Weeping Meadow (2004)
6.2 The Dust of Time (2008)

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After studying and practicing in Paris, Theo Angelopoulos (Greece, 1935) went back to Greece and directed his first films: Anaparastasi/ Reconstruction (1970), a rural drama from Cain's "Postman" but under the influence of classical Greek theater and of Rouch's anthropological documentaries; and especially the period trilogy begun with Meres Tu '36/ The Days of '36 (1972), a political drama set during the Greek dictatorship of the 1930s. These early films started his collaboration with cinematographer Yorgos Arvanitis.

His first major work was the four-hour O Thiasos/ Travelling Players (1975), set during World War II, a tragedy of betrayal, at both national and personal levels. Its foundations are Aeschylus' Oresteia, but there is a lot of Fellini in the reminiscence of rural life and a lot of Brecht in the didactic presentation of the plot. The action is accompanied with a lot of traditional music (soundtrack by Loukianos Kilaidonis), but little dialogue. Theo Angelopoulos uses long shots that sometime take the viewer from one subject to another, and sometimes from one era to another, while crossing a large section of an environment. Deserted landscapes and deserted streets abound. History is more a silence than a clamor. Most scenes are allegories, as is the ubiquitous presence of the sea. The characters of the film rarely talk: when they talk, they go on forever. Theo Angelopoulos also contrasts the glory of ancient Greece with the pathetic convulsions of modern Greece, now reduced to a poor country. Here, Agamennon is a refugee who leads a ragtag troupe of traveling actors who wander from town to town, hardly the hero of ancient Greece.

An accordionist on stage introduces a five-part drama, "Golfo the Shepherdess". Then in the dark we hear a sequence of knocks. The representation begins. A group of people (a travelling actor troupe) emerges out of a train station in a rural Greek village, Aegion. They slowly walk forward, holding their suitcases. The narrating voice explained that it is 1952 and they are veterans, returning there for the first time since 1939. A truck runs by on advertising a candidate on loudspeakers: an electoral campaign is underway.
A flashback brings back to the same town in 1939. Goebbels is about to visit the town. The actors are eating at a restaurant. The accordionist leads their singing. The local fascists run in the square singing fascist songs. Out of the restaurant the actors walk into a hotel. Then they stand at the balcony, staring at the yard. They rehearse the drama in the yard. At night a young lady wanders in the hotel and hears a couple make love. She's shocked (the woman is her mother): she slides down against the wall and cries alone. The lovers (later called Clytamnestra and Aegisthus) leave the room making sure nobody sees them. A soldier (later called Orestes) enters the room and wakes up his mother. A young woman hugs him and calls him Orestes (he calls her Golfo, the title of the play). Later, the soldier and two friends walk on the railway tracks to a wood, where they recite communist slogans. An old man walks towards them, greeted warmly. Fascists are walking downstairs carrying an ancient Greek bust.
(The nicknames of the actors are taken from the Oresteia: the father Agamemnon, the adulterous mother Clytamnestra, her lover Aegisthus, the avenging daughter Elektra, the avenging son Orestes, and the other daughter Chrisothemis).
The actors walk on stage, dressed in costumes. There is no audience. They start dancing at the sound of an accordion, introducing the story of Tassos and Golfo. They walk outside and mingle with the curious bystanders. Knocks like in the beginning, the accordion, the curtain opens and the play finally begins.
Two people are being chased in the street, beaten, taken into a car. The actors take down the scenography. The actors travel in a train wagon with wood benches. One of them says that the Turks occupied Asia Minor in 1922, amd he had to flee, a refugee with no roof and no job.
When the actors get off the train, a band is playing in the background1 and marching along the sea. There are flags at the balconies, and the church bells are ringing. The actors carrying their luggage walk into the crowd.
Knocks in the dark. Voices of an audience. The presented dressed in a costune tells the audience that the Italians have invaded Greece. It is now 1940. The story of Golfo begins again, but air-raid sirens go off and the audience flees.
One of the actors enrolls in the army. His wife laughs at him and he slaps her in the face. Then she opens her legs but he simply walks away in silence. A fascist walks into the room and has sex with the woman.
A man in uniform follows a woman into a room. He attacks her and she resits him then she tells him to undress. He strips naked (long scene). She lets him finish and then walks out.
At a balcony the authorities are ready in the fascist salute and wrapped in the swastick to greet a visitor (Goebbels?)
The actors take a stroll by the sea. The electoral campaign tells us that we back to 1952.
Back to war time, the German police walks into a theater and finds the actors sleeping on the floor: informers have told the Germans that an Englishman is hiding there. The actors walk on stage and recite sentences from the play, one at a time, some still dressed in their robe (to prove that they are indeed Greek actors). One of the actresses bites the ear of one of the actors (Aegisthus), accusing him of being an informer.
The father is executed by the Germans: Agamennon. Aegisthus has turned him in to the Germans, probably for something that Agamennon never did (sheltering the Englishman).
The actors walk in the streets, always well dressed and silent. A man, escaped from prison, hugs the daughter: he's a partisan and calls her Electra, and tells her that Orestes is in the mountains.
A young woman knocks at a door: she gets a bottle from the owner of the business, and she has to strip and sing for him, while he masturbates in a rocking chair.
As she walks out, two men shoot the pervert. She walks into another building and brings the bottle to the other actors.
The actors are walking, dancing and singing along a snowy road, their luggage loaded on mules. They sing about Golfo. They find two men hanged by a tree in a little square. Hungry, they surround a chicken in the snow. Only the actors in the landscape.
German soldiers stop a bus and arrest the passengers, including the actors. They take them inside a fort. The informer begs that he is an informer and cries. The soldiers grab him, he hides behind a woman. The Germans are about to shoot them, but the partisans attack. The following morning the Greeks celebrate the victory inside the fort: the Germans have left. The partisans arrive riding horses and are welcomed by the crowd.
Fast forward to the electoral campaign: a bus followed by a crowd, chanting in favor of a government of national unity.
In the main square of the town, a crowd assembles, singing and waving both American and Soviet flags to celebrate the liberation. The soldiers shoot and the crowd disbands, leaving a few bodies in the square. A Scotsman crosses the square playing his bagpipe. One of the "deads" gets up: he's carrying an accordion. From another street a crowd advances carrying red flags. They assemble in the same square, around the dead bodies, facing the place where the shots came from.
In the middle of the night, the actors are trying to leave town unseen. Armed groups are moving in, and engage the armed people who are defending the town (British?). The invaders are repelled by motorized troops. The actors sneak away. As they are walking with their luggage on the beach, the actors are stopped by British soldiers. The coward actor screams that they are not communists. Once they understand that these are actors, the British soldiers ask them to perform the drama of Tassos and Golfo on the beach. At the end the accordionist intones "Roll Over the Barrel" and everybody dances. A shot and a British soldier falls dead: communist rebels are attacking again.
Another performance of Golfo's drama, this time in front of a real audience: the actors are entertaining the British troops. An acress sneaks away and visits the headquarters of the rebels. In the middle of the night, she leads the rebel to the british barracks. People come out of a bar dancing at sensual Latin music, while the communists, unseen, spread through the town. Inside the building the actors are still perfoming Golfo. In the last scene of the play, an armed man shoots two of the actors. The audience gives them a standing ovation, as if it were the final act of the play, but the soldier was real, and the actors are truly dead. Orestes has taken his revenge: his mother and the traitor are dead.
The surviving actors stand outside, speechless. Then they walk slowly to their room, without exchanging a single word (as usual).
Two men, wearing masks, walk into the building. The camera stays in the hall. We hear the steps, a bang, more steps, voices. They kidnapped one of the actresses, the daughter referred to as Elektra. She is taken to a restaurant, held on the ground and raped by the man who interrogates her. They want to know about Orestes. She only replies that he is in the mountains. They dump her out of town, where she wakes up dirty and wounded. She gets up and starts narrating how in 1944 the British invaded Greece and the Greeks felt betrayed. When the British and the fascists shot on the crowds, the communist rebellion began in earnest. A lenghty scene follows that simply replays the political events of 1944. Horsemen ride into this scene: communist rebels who surrender.
As the actress who was raped walks back home after an evening with the British troops, and sees a friend leave, a child walks by reading an episode of Greek history. The police walk into her room. They look around, sit on her couch for a while, and then, without saying a word, leave photographs of the man they are still looking for: the actor who joined the partisans.
A comic Brecht-ian detour allegorically depicts the Greek civil war. In a restaurant, during the celebrations of new year's eve, right-wing and left-wing Greeks square off, singing each other's version of the fact, like in a musical. The right-wing is represented by a group of well-dressed middle-aged males. The left-wing is led by a handsome young man and consists of young males and females. They lead the restaurant's band into a frantic swing number. The right-wing pulls out a gun. The young man of the left wing shows that he carries no weapons. The left-wing crowd leaves, and the right-wing crowd tells the orchestra to play a slow, traditional dance, whose lyrics hail the national guard. The raped woman is outside, listening to the music. The accordionist approaches her. She tells him that Orestes has not surredered yet. In the morning, the right-wing crowd is walking home drunk in the empty (as usual) streets. As the shot ends, the communist rebellion has been defeated by the military, with help from the USA (several years have elapsed as these people were walking down the street to the square).
British troops drive into town triumphantly, displaying the heads of two communist rebels. Dozens od others are marched prisoners into town. They are taken to the square and displayed to the townfolk. One of them is Orestes.
The raped woman, Elektra, waits for a boat. A rebel gets off the boat. He has agreed to abandon the armed rebellion and has been released. A military band enters town playing a happy tune. The former rebel watches without a word. Then he starts narrating how he was arrested in 1947 and beaten because he didn't want to sign. He goes into a lengthy description of the tortures. Eventually, he gave up and signed.
A wedding by the beach: an American soldier is marrying a Greek woman, the other daughter (Chrisothemis), who has a teenage son. The distressed son walks away dragging the table cloth (and thus all the dishes) behind him. He is a rebel like his uncle Orestes.
The raped woman (Elektra) and the former rebel visit another, older communist leader. He speaks cryptic sentences about the revolution (and its failure).
The raped woman (Elektra) is summoned in a prison, where she is notified that her brother (Orestes) is dead. She visits the dead man, and calls him Tassos. The actors bury the dead man, and clap their hands as the caretakers dig earth on the coffin.
Fast forward to the electoral campaign. The actors are preparing yet another performance of the same play. They have hired a new actor, and the raped woman (Elektra) calls him Orestes: he is her nephew, her sister's rebellious son who repudiated her mother when she married an American officer.
We hear the knocks again, but this time we also see the man who causes them with a hammer, as well as the accordionist: we see them backstage, instead of seeing the dark curtain from the front, as if Theo Angelopoulos wanted to show himself.
The actors are again at the train station. "In the fall of 1939, we returned to Aegion. We were tired. We hadn't slept for two days." They stare around. The end.
In a nutshell, the wife of the troupe's leader cheated on him with a fascist. The betrayed husband enrolled in the army. Their son Orestes became a leader of the resistance, and was eventually arrested and killed. (Is the troop back in Aegion for Orestes' funeral?)

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La dittatura dei colonnelli è al centro invece di Oi Kynighi/ The Hunters (1977).

O Megalexandros/ Alexander the Great (1980), di nuovo 4 ore, fonde sia pure nei modi più astratti dell'apologo e della metafora ancora una volta mito antico e storia moderna. Replica in un misero paese montuoso i riti del potere: discorso antropologico sul bisogno di un capo, analisi politica della strumentalizzazione del ribelle ad opera del regime, dibattito sulle prospettive della sinistra, parabola sul potere, etc. The film is based on a real event: the Dilesi Massacre of 1870.

Un brigante evaso di prigione arrogante ed epilettico che tiene in ostaggio degli inglesi è considerato un eroe dai compaesani, ma un maestro che tenta un esperimento di comunismo consensuale si oppone al suo carisma e tenta disperatamente di evitare lo scontro con l'esercito, mentre alcuni terroristi italiani esasperano gli animi; falliranno tutti, tanto il comunista, quanto gli anarchici, quanto il tiranno, che, dopo la sconfitta e lo sterminio, sarà lapidato dagli stessi popolani che avevano creduto in lui.

Theo Angelopoulos then devoted himself to the "trilogy of silence", three films scripted with Italian poet Tonino Guerra and scored by Eleni Karaindrou, and photographed as usual by Arvanitis: The silence of history, the silence of love, and the silence of god.

Taxidi Sta Kithira/ Voyage to Cythera (1984), his first film set entirely in the present, scripted with Tonino Guerra (an Italian poet who co-wrote the scripts for Antonioni, Fellini and Tarkovsky) and scored by Eleni Karaindrou, doesn't follow the usual liturgic-mythological-collective-hystorical scheme. Instead it is a meditation on love and death. Angelopoulos moves from the epic to the elegy, from collective tragedy to individual tragedy, by telling the end of an aging political exile.
There are actually two protagonists: a filmmaker and an old man with no nationality. And there are two stories: the filmmaker wants to make a film (presumably a mythological version of his father's story), and the old man, his father, is coming back home. The old man is the tragic hero: his glorious past erased, his nationality erased, he is a ghost of history. This Ulysses is disappointed by the home he finds and decides to restart his journey but he can only drift away in no man's land.
Here Angelopoulos sticks to linear chronology, unlike previous films where time and space were confused dimensions, and in fact multi-dimensional dimensions.
As usual, Angelopulos uses fog, mist, rain and sea to reflect humankind's condition and destiny. As usual, the mood is of a man who cannot find peace with history, haunted by memories of the civil war. The film is perhaps overlong because little happens in the middle section, while we are only marginally informed of past events. In the end the film is more about love and death.

A child, Alexandros, hits a soldier guarding a national monument. The child then flees, chased by the soldier, and hides in his house. The film fast forwards to Alexandros as an adult living in a luxury home with great views of the city with his wife and little child. He has become a filmmaker. His crew is examining old men who are auditioning to recite a simple line, "It's me". While the crew continues the audition, he takes a break at a cafe' where he meets his lover, an actress who is studying a script. She complains that he has deserted her. He looks pensive and frustrated. Then an old poor man walks into the cafe', peddling lavender to the customers, and Alexandros lightens up. Alexandros follows the old man into the subway and then through the streets all the way to the port. At the port Alexandros is met by his sister Voula who was waiting for him. She takes him to welcome a ship that is just entering the harbor. There is a civil war exile on the ship who is returning to Greece after 32 years: his father Spyro. The old man looks like the poor seller and we realize that the filmmaker followed him because of the resemblance. He is the only man to disembark. His first words are: "It's me". His only luggage is a suitcase and a violin case. Voula and Alexandros take him to their mother's house, where he is reunited with family and friends. His wife Katerina only asks him if he's hungry and then sits alone on the bed of her bedroom. Spyro joins her and someone closes the door of their bedroom. While the others are getting ready for a welcome dinner, a few minutes later Alexandros' mother walks out angry and locks herself in another room, while his father Spyro picks up his luggage and leaves the house without saying a word. Alexandros runs after him and follows him to a hotel. The father refuses to tell Alexandros what he told his mother that upset her so much: she longed all those years for his return and he broke her heart. The following day Alexandros drives his father, his sister and his mother to their home village. They arrive as a thick fog is enveloping the landscape. The father whistles and someone replies: it's a secret code. The father and his old friend Panayotis start a conversation of whistles. The mother can understand that language too. Alexandros, Voula and their mother remain at the car while the father meets his friend. He even recognizes the dog Argos (32 years old?) The father and Panayotis visit a cemetery where old friends are buried. Suddenly we see a crowd advancing on the hills: some are on donkeys, some in old cars and some on foot, but it's a vision of the past. Panayotis laments that people have abandoned the place and are only interested in selling the land for money. Alexandros joins Spyro and Panayotis, and the three of them walk slowly back to the car. Spyro still has the key to their old house and opens it. Nobody has lived there in many years. Voula tells Spyro that a developer is buying the land to build a winter resort. They haven't accepted because they were waiting for his return. A crowd is assembled on the hill. Alexandros accompanies Spyro there. It's a ceremony, organized by the mayor, for a collective signature to sell the land to the corporation. The owners are called one by one to sign the papers. Everybody has to sign or the deal is off. Spyro, however, walks away. The mayor gets angry at Spyro and they almost get into a fight, but they are too old and quickly run out of breath. The crowd disperses. The mayor comes to the house while they are having dinner and asks Katerina to sign, and insults and mocks Spyro, calling him a dead man because he was sentenced to death four times. Voula is also angry at her father for being so stubborn. She accuses him of having destroyed his wife's life as she suffered a lot because of him: she went to prison for his sake while he fought on the mountains. She reminds Spyro that his wife wasted her life. We understand that he was a communist fighter during the right-wing dictatorship in Greece, and found asylum in the Soviet Union for 32 years. He confesses to the family that he has a wife there and three other children. Everybody leaves the village, but Spyro remains, without any explanation for why. The mayor bids him farewell and regrets that they fought each other during the war. Someone sets on fire the shed where Spyro keeps his tools. Alexandros drives his mother and his sister home, and Panayotis travels with them. Voula is angry she got herself involved. She calls their father "a ghost". Alexandros, his mother Katerina and Panayotis (but not Voula) drive back to the village where police are searching for the disappeared Spyro. They fear that Spyro burned alive in the shed. Panayotis whistles. Spyro replies: he is hiding inside the house. Katerina alone walks into the house and says "It's me". Spyro comes out, walking like he lost his mind. The police leave, but the chief warns Alexandros that Spyro has no nationality and can be deported any time if he causes any more trouble. Alexandros is ready to drive his parents back to the city but his father doesn't want to leave, and surprisingly his mother decides to stay with him. Alexandros finally returns to the city and visits an actress backstage: his lover. She has just ended a performance. At first she doesn't want to talk to him, but then she runs after him and they have sex on the floor of the theater. Back home, Alexandros finds a message on the answering machine that they are taking the ferry to Cythera. He reads a movie script that is lying on his table: it talks about an old couple who have to leave their house for the third time (the story of his own parents?) Meanwhile, his parents are leaving the house and the village, traveling in the back of a humble truck. He has decided to return to Russia but misses the boat. They are detained by the police because he has no nationality. Alexandros, Voula and Panayotis arrive. Spyro speaks to the walls as if they were his lifelong enemies. The police decide to deport him and everybody heads to the port, again in a thick fog. The ship's captain however refuses to take the passenger unless the passenger declares that he wants to leave of his own will, but Spyro seems to have lost his mind. The stress proves too much for Katerina who collapses. Meanwhile, the police decide to abandon Spyro in international waters on a raft and the poor old man is abandoned on the raft in the middle of a storm while the police chief awaits for futher instructions. Alexandros, Voula and Panayotis cannot do anything to help Spyro and wait in a restaurant. A journalist arrives, intrigued by the case. Katerina revives. The rain stops, but night falls. Meanwhile the loudspeakers announce the annual party of the dockers, and people begin assembling, singing and dancing in the same restaurant. Alexandros tries to make a phone call but can't find a quiet place. He walks into a closet but a couple are having sex there. The dockers are touched by Spyro's misadventure and invite Katerina on stage to give a speech. She only says one sentence: that she wants to go with her husband. The police chief accepts her request and takes her to the draft. Spyro and Katerina are now reunited. Spyro releases the rope that keeps the draft from drifting away, and they both stand up, facing the horizon, while the raft drifts away from the port into the unknown.

O Melissokomos/ The Beekeeper (1986), again scripted by Guerra and scored by Karaindrou, e` la storia di un maestro di scuola (Marcello Mastroianni) isolato dalla famiglia, che a 60 anni può soltanto tornare alle sue radici, al mestiere di apicultore che fu di suo padre e che lui ha continuato tutte le primavere: si riappropria dei rituali di quel mestiere antico, e si mette in viaggio verso il Sud con le sue arnie, accoglie una autostoppista senza meta, che lo segue in quel viaggio per lo più silenzioso fra i ricordi del suo passato. L'unica a tentare di comunicare con lui è la ragazza, che accetta anche di fare l'amore (in un vecchio cinema diroccato del suo paese natale). Lui è senza futuro, lei senza passato. Il maestro si rende conto di non aver saputo tramandare la sua vita alla storia, e che nessuno, per esempio, continuerà la sua opera di apicultore: apre le arnie e si lascia divorare a morte dalle api. Quello di Spyro e` un vagabondaggio autobiografico. Spyro si rende progressivamente conto di non essere nessuno: e` un eterno passante, che guarda gli altri vivere. Simbolismo, solitudine dell'uomo davanti alla storia, amaro pessimismo sulle conseguenze della disgregazione della famiglia.

La voce di un uomo racconta a una bambina la storia dell'ape regina. Spyro appare stanco, distratto e pensieroso al matrimonio della figlia. Sua moglie e` altrettanto triste. La figlia e gli invitati sono estasiati alla vista di un uccellino. Gli sposi partono e Spyro culla un'ultima volta sua figlia. Il figlio e` irritato con lui per il suo comportamento abulico. Spyro saluta la moglie, da cui si e` separato. La moglie gli chiede invano "cosa ti ho fatto?" Lui non ha risposta. Rimasto solo, piange. Poi si dedica alle sue api. Si aggrega a una colonna di camion che parte per le colline. Un tempo erano in tanti e l'inizio della stagione era occasione di festa. Adesso sono rimasti in cinque o sei, anziani e nostalgici. Spyro raccoglie per strada una ragazza abbandonata dal ragazzo, una teenager scapestrata che non ha una meta. Spyro, come tutti gli apicultori, deve seguire un percorso, lungo il quale le api faranno il miele. In ogni posto Spyro depone le sue arnie per qualche giorno e alloggia in una pensione. La ragazza gli chiede ospitalita` e lui, praticamente senza parlarle, acconsente. Lei ne abusa, arrivando a portarsi in camera persino un vecchio amico e a fare l'amore nel letto di fianco a quello di Spyro. Durante il suo pellegrinaggio, Spyro ritrova i posti della sua giovinezza. Va a trovare in manicomio l'amico francese impazzito e lo porta a rivedere il mare (e` soprattutto malato di ricordi). Sempre in viaggio con le sue arnie, Spyro perde e ritrova la ragazza. Va a trovare la moglie e tenta di convincerlo a seguirlo, ma lei si mette soltanto a piangere e lui le dice semplicemente addio. Torna in paese a cercare la ragazza, la trova in un ristorante e sfonda la vetrina con il camion. La ragazza salta sul camion e se ne va con lui. Questa volta tenta di baciarla con la forza, ma lei non vuole. La tappa successiva e` dall'altra figlia, con cui ebbe un diverbio mai sanato: le chiede perdono. La tappa successiva e` la casa di un tempo, ora abbandonata. Una delle poche cose che lo fanno sorridere. La ragazza si e` ubriacata. Gli morde la mano e succhia il sangue. Un vecchio amico gli offre di dormire sul palcoscenico del vecchio cinema del paese. Su quel palcoscenico la ragazza gli si offre finalmente e lui la prende con passione. Lei continua a ripetere "let me go" ma gli si avvinghia. Dopo averla lasciata, torna al teatro da solo a guardare il palcoscenico. Poi nel prato libera le api e lascia che lo pungano a morte.

Il tema centrale di Topio Stin Omichli/ Landscape In The Mist (1988), co-scripted again with Guerra, scored again by Eleni Karaindrou and photographed as usual by Arvanitis, and starring again Marcello Mastroianni, e` un'iniziazione alla vita alla Walkabout (Nicholas Roeg), o, meglio, una versione da incubo di Walkabout. It contains some of the most strikingly poetic images of his cinema, notably the giant marble hand emerging from the sea and being carried away in the sky by a helicoptera, and also the final scene in which they seem to have reached paradise and hug a tree as if it were the father that they were searching for. It is a parable but not one that can be explained in words. The story is about two runaway children who wander in search of the father that they have never seen, perhaps an allegory about modern Green searching for the glory of a mythological ancient Greece. It is the "Odyssey" in reverse: the father never comes home, the warriors are abandoned and perhaps killed in a futile battle in foreign land, and there is no divine intervention to help them. The trilogy is not so much about silence but about absence.

Una notte due bambini corrono verso la stazione. Il bambino Alexander chiede alla bambina Voula se ha paura. Un venditore li riconosce: vengono tutte le sere. Si fermano davanti al treno, si muovono quando e` troppo tardi, lo guardano partire. I bambini dormono e la bambina racconta la storia di come nacque il mondo. La madre viene tutte le sere e li interrompe. I bambini vanno a visitare una prigione e il bambino Alexander saluta il matto Gabbiano. Di nuovo alla stazione. Questa volta prendono il treno per la Germania. Esultano. La bambina scrive al padre che hanno deciso di andarlo a cercare. Non hanno biglietti. Il conduttore li scarica alla prima stazione. Si fanno accompagnare dallo zio. Lo zio sa che in realta` non c'e' alcun padre in Germania, la madre non sa chi sia il padre. La bambina lo sente e si infuria. Il poliziotto li accompagna alla stazione di polizia. TUtti sono sorpresi perche' sta nevicando e corrono fuori a guardare la neve. I bambini ne approfittano per scappare e prendere di nuovo lo stesso treno. Camminano nella neve. Sposa che scappa dal marito, un trattore perde il cavallo che stava trainando, e gente cha canta sullo sfondo. I bambini piangono davanti al cavallo morente mentre la folla dello sposalizio passa sullo sfondo. Camminano sulla strada in salita. Un commediante da` loro un passaggio sul suo autobus, In paese incontrano gli altri attori, depressi perche' non hanno trovato un teatro. Il bambino va a cercare cibo in un ristorante e il padrone gli offre cibo in cambio di pulire i tavoli. Entra un violinista. Poi cammina per le strade e incontra soldati che issano la bandiera. Il commediante Oreste e la bambina lo ritrovano. I tre camminano per le strade deserte fino a sera tarda. Il commediante regala al bambino un frammento di pellicola di un paesaggio nella nebbia. Viaggiano con il commediante. Si fermano su una spiaggia, dove un gruppo di persone si raccontano memorie e parlano da soli delle loro esperienze di guerra, come se recitassero su un palcoscenico. Sono gli attori che provano le loro parti. Ma non riescono a trovare un teatro in cui recitare. Lasciano gli attori e fanno l'autostop sotto la pioggia. Il camionista beve e la volenta mentre il bambino dorme. Camminano sotto la pioggia. La bambina scrive ancora lettere mentali al padre, fidandosi dei sogni del fratellino che sente il padre vicino. Di nuovo sul treno. La polizia lo ferma e perlustra i vagoni. I bambini scendono di corsa e scappano. Ritrovano Oreste, che li carica sulla moto. Oreste vorrebbe insegnare a Voula a ballare ma la bambina e` glaciale e scappa piangendo. Incontrano di nuovo gli attori che hanno deciso di vendere i costumi. Arrivano in una citta`. Vanno alla stazione ma la bambina non vuole piu` partire. Dormono in un hotel ma Oreste non riesce a dormire. La mattina Oreste scopre una mano gigantesca che galleggia nel mare. Un elicottero la recupera. Oreste li porta in moto a un popolare luogo di raduno per giovani in motocicletta alla periferia della citta`. Li porta poi in un club, ma la bambina si indispettisce di essere ignorata e si incammina con il fratellino di nuovo lungo la strada deserta. Oreste li insegue in moto, la bambina finalmente scoppia a piangere fra le sue braccia. Di nuovo alla stazione. La bambina ottiene i soldi del biglietto da un soldato a cui si e` offerta, ma che l'ha rifiutata dopo aver tentannato a lungo. Scendono dal treno al confine per evitare le guardie di frontiera. Trovano una barca e ci salgono sopra, al buio. Si odono spari, presumibilmente dalle guardie di frontiera. Non sappiamo se i bambini sono stati uccisi, ma il film riprende all'alba. I bambini non riescono a vedere dove sono per via di una fitta foschia. La foschia si leva e si rivela il paesaggio della pellicola di Oreste: un albero alla fine di un prato. I bambini corrono verso l'albero e lo abbracciano come se avessero trovato il padre.

To Meteoro Vima Tou Pelargou/ Suspended Step of the Stork (1991), made with the same team of Guerra, Arvanitis, Karaindrou and Mastroianni, is a poem of loneliness, a political essay on borders, walls and bridges (made two years after the fall of the Berlin Wall), and an allegorical tale about forced migration and displacement, which is the exact opposite of Ulysses' journey home and a more real one for millions of people. Refugees erase their roots, and this film is also about the psychology of not having a homeland anymore. The anti-Homeric journey of these people without a homeland becomes a quest for identity. The Ulysses of this film is a man who doesn't want to be himself and doesn't want to be found and doesn't want to return home. He fundamentally doesn't know what home is and where it is. The town of the refugees is a limbo, a transit place, and possibly a purgatory. The mood is similar to Tarkovsky's Nostalghia (1982) and some scenes evoke Antonioni's stories of alienation, but there are also religious overtones, particularly the last scene in which telephone workers stand on top of poles like ancient stylites. This film, that stars Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau as a (possibly) separated couple, was released exactly 30 years after Antonioni's La Notte, in which Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau play a tormented married couple. The torment simply got bigger and incurable. The truth is never revealed, but the two options are that they didn't find each other or found each other but chose to remain separated.

The voiceover of a television reporter, Alexander, talks about the fate of the asylum seekers while the camera is showing helicopters rescuing the corpse of refugees who died in the sea. A military officer escorts Alexander to the border and raises his leg like a stork over the dividing line: one more step he will either be in another country or... dead. Then the soldier points at the town where the government is keeping the refugees who are in transit, waiting for their asylum to be approved. The TV crew enters the town and starts filming, notably a long train that is being used as a refugee camp. The camera slides from left to right showing one by one all the families that live in the cars of the train. Then we hear their voices as they tell their stories.
Back in his TV studio the reporter/filmmaker watches the footage and is fascinated by the image of an old man who sells potatoes. The reporter relates this man to an unsolved disappearance. He approaches the ex-wife of a famous politician and writer who has been missing for ten years. She doesn't know anything that isn't already public and thinks that he is dead. The reporter reads the book that made the politician famous as a writer: "Despair at the End of the Century". The reporter clearly thinks that the potato seller is the missing politician and returns to the market. He is told that the old man is an Albanese refugee. The reporter spends a night in a dancehall, where a young woman stares at him. She follows him in his room without saying a word and presumably they have sex. The reporter visits the old man who is telling a fairy tale to a child about a kite that saves the children on the last days of the Earth before it falls into the Sun. The military officer is still guiding the reporter through the town of immigrants. The old man doesn't really want to talk with the reporter, but the reporter seems more convinced than ever that this is the missing politician. The reporter calls the politician's wife and asks her to join him. In a cafe he witnesses a brawl between refugees: somebody accuses another one of being a traitor. The reporter returns to the hut of the old man, and we see that the young woman is the old man's daughter. (The fact that the old man has a daughter seems to prove that he is not the missing politician). The old man tells the reporter that he works to fix telephone poles, hanging from the top like a bird. The following day the reporter is at the station waiting for the lady and sees that one of the refugees, presumably the "traitor", has been hanged from a crane. Women are screaming as the body is being lowered to the ground while the lady's train is arriving. The military officer comments that these refugees have left their country behind only to build new borders. The crew gets recalled to the capital but the reporter's man accept to postpone the return until the lady can identify the old man. It is the holiday season and the crew sings Christmas carols. The crew picks up the woman and takes her to the refugee camp. She faces the old man, who is clearly startled to see her (we see the scene into the screen of the videocamera); but then the woman turns towards the camera and says that this is not her ex-husband. The old man is puzzled but then walks away. Next we watch a television special about the politician's disappearance. The voiceover tells us that he wrote a prophetic pessimistic book that correctly predicted their times. The TV then shows his last speech at a plenary session of the country's parliament: he shows up, pulls out the papers, then puts them back into his pocket and leaves the podium without speaking. A crowd gathers at the station to bid farewell to a train of refugees who get deported. The reporter follows the old man as he walks along the river and then enters the water to catch fish. The reporter plays a tape of the politician that the ex-wife gave him (the voice is obviously the same because it is Mastroianni's). The old man continues his walk, bent into the water, hand stretched to catch fish.
Having failed the mission, the crew prepares to return to the capital. In a cafe the reporter learns that a wedding is about to be celebrated between two young people who are separated by the river, living in two different countries. The military officer points at the old man's daughter: she is the bride. An accordionist plays walking around her. She doesn't move and doesn't speak. The military officer bids farewell. The camera pans slowly across a crowd assembled by the river, passing by the bride in white and the river. Then it stops and we see a crowd appear on the other side of the river, the groom's party. And the crowd on this side, the bride's party, starts running too. We only hear the sounds of the river. We can't hear the voices as the wedding is celebrated by the two crowds on opposite sides of the river. The spouses only exchange gestures, not words. Then shots disperse the crowds, but the two spouses return along to the respective banks to wave one last time at each other. The crew has been filming the whole wedding. The reporter approaches father and daughter and she tells him that she grew up with her groom. The reporter admits that he is in pain. She admits that she's in pain too. The father cries but tells the report that he's happy. It is now New Year's Day. The reporter walks towards the border alone, the same place where the film started. And he does what the military officer did: raises his foot over the dividing line like a stork. The military officer summons him to the river because the old man has disappeared: he was last seen carrying a suitcase. The child tells the reporter that the old man walked over the water to the other side. The old man never finished the fairy tale: how did people survive the fall into the Sun? The reporter walks along the river where telephone workers in yellow raincoats are climbing a dozen poles. When they reach the top, they all stop in the exact same position, like in a ballet. Eventually, the reporter leaves them and starts walking towards the river that separates the two countries, and we see the poles reflected in the river and the reporter staring at the camera, that is revealed to be on the other side.

The three-hour To Vlemma tou Odyssea/ Ulysses' Gaze (1995) made with Guerra, Arvanitis and Karaindrou but this time starring Harvey Keitel, is another historical meditation. Three eras are captured in just the first scene of the film by the simple panning of the camera (1905, 1954, 1994). This modern Odysseus is a filmmaker who is looking for the original film, long lost. Returning to Ithaca is not difficult, but what is difficult, in fact impossible, is to recover the original innocence. The journey is not so much a nostalgic journey into the past as a meditation on how humankind's worst instincts destroy the past. The summary of one century of political upheavals, from the time of the Ottoman Empire to the repressive dictatorship of Greece and culminating in the civil war of Yugoslavia, is a metaphor for the long and arduous journey that humankind is still embarked on, and the diasporas of the Balkan region are emblematic of the effects on ordinary people, who seem to be constantly on the move. Angelopulos is sometimes Proust and sometimes Fellini, sometimes lyrical and sometimes sardonic. The film boasts mesmerizing visually and technically virtuoso scenes that condense the simultaneous passing of different eras in his stream of consciousness.

The film begins with footage from the very first film ever shot in the Balkans. It was made in 1905 by the brothers Manakis and it is the "first gaze" into the traditional life of the region. The man who worked with the Manakis as a young assistant tells (and the screen shows) how in 1954 the surviving Manakis brother died while photographing a ship. The camera follows the assistant who walks away from the dead man and towards a younger man (Harvey Keitel) with a modern port in the background. We are now in the present. The assistant tells this younger man that some reels of the Manakis film have been lost. The younger man walks away and sees a sailing boat in the sea: the ship of 1954?
A famous filmmaker (the younger man of the first scene) just arrived in a town of northern Greece to witness the showing of his film, but religious organizations have pledged to block the film in the theaters so the film, an English-language film, has to be shown outdoors in the square. Photographers surround the filmmaker. The friend who welcomed him tells him that his film is causing a scandal, and that the town is split in two. A line in the film says "How many borders must we cross to reach home?" This town is the filmmaker's home town that he hasn't visited in 35 years. Everything has changed and he starts reminiscing how it was. A procession of women is walking down the street. The filmmaker tells his companion that he has come for different reason: to find the lost reels of the 1905 film. Now the filmmaker walks alone in the streets of his hometown. Soon he finds himself in the middle of a confrontation between protesters and police officers. A taxi takes him to the border. At the border he meets an elderly woman who wants cross the border into Albania to visit the sister she hasn't seen in 47 years since the civil war, and he sees a bus dumping a group of Albanian refugees who are being deported back home. Then he resumes his journey by taxi through a wasteland buried in snow where thousands of people are waiting or walking. After dropping off the elderly woman in the middle of a deserter square, the car gets stuck in the snow. The driver starts chatting with the filmmaker, crying that Greece is dying. The filmmaker finally reaches his destination: the town where his family used to live after having moved with thousands of refugees on foot (that we see in vintage footage). The family opened a movie theater. He meets with a young woman who works for a museum but she is initially unfriendly and refuses to answer his questions about the lost reels. Eventually she reveals the location where some old material has been stored. She gets off the train but, as the train starts moving, he starts telling her of a visit to a magical place, and she has to start running because the train is picking up speed. He tells her that he tried in vain to photograph the place: the camera wouldn't show the picture. She is now running as fast as she can. He pulls her inside and they make love in his compartment until a border guard demands their passports. They are taken to the police station and separated. The filmmaker is taken into a barren room and interrogated by a man wearing a coat and smoking a cigarette who refers to him as Yannakis, one of the two Manakis brothers, against whom the government has issued an arrest warrant whereas his brother Miltos has escaped to Albania. The two brothers are suspects because explosives were found in their possessino, presumably meant for sabotage missions against the Bulgarian state and its German ally. We have clearly traveled back to World War II. The official reads the filmmaker a death sentence. he is blindfolded and escorted outside in the dark to be shot, but the king has just granted him exile instead of death. Now the film resumes the story in the present: the filmmaker leaves the border post and rejoins the woman who was getting nervous about the lengthy delay. They cross the border on foot and then board another train. He starts telling her that in 1905 his family lived in Romania and they heard rumors about a new French invention, cinema. The train is going to Romania and she questions why is he going to a place where the Manakis' reels certainly cannot be because Greece and Romania did not have diplomatic relations in the 1950s.
He gets off the train and meets... his mother. We are back to his childhood, even if the camera still shows an adult man. They take the train together. The mother treats him like a child. They run into a communist demonstration. They visit relatives for a special occasion and he is sent to play with the other children. A special guest arrives: his father, finally released from a German concentration camp. So it must be 1945. They sing because it is New Year's Eve. Everybody dances but then suddenly they stop because two men wearing coats walk in. They take away one of the male relatives and wish "Happy 1948" to the others before walking out. The party resumes but it is soon interrupted again by a group of communists who come to confiscate a piano, and someone shouts "Happy 1950". The large extended family takes a group picture and this time he is really impersonated by a child. The camera zooms in on the face of the child.
The filmmaker wakes up in a bed, next to the woman. They walk upside and witness a crane lifting a giant head of Lenin. It is part of a giant statue that is being loaded on a barge on behalf of a collector. Here he parts way with the woman. He boards the barge and travels with the dismantled Lenin statue up the Danube river. We hear again the voiceover telling the story of when in 1905 the family learned of the invention of cinema. At night the barge reaches the border with Yugoslavia, where civil war is raging on, and in the morning it continues its slow steady journey up the river. The camera turns around the giant white head of Lenin.
The filmmaker disembarks and is welcomed by an old friend, a journalist. The friend takes him immediately in the building where the reels were stored. The archivist remembers perfectly well receiving the reels from Yannakis and trying to develop them with all sorts of chemical experiments but to no avail. Then another archivist borrowed them to give it another try, but the war has separated the cities and this archivist has lost touch with the other archivist who has the reels. The filmmaker and his friend drink to their lost illusions as the television broadcasts images of the war. The filmmaker is determined to travel to the war-torn city to rescue the reels, no matter how dangerous. A woman warns him that the police is looking for him. He has to row a boat across a river. He reaches a wasteland of bombed buildings, terrified civilians and graves. The woman in black who accompanies him is mourning a family member. She mumbles the names of all the armies that fought over this land. At night she hugs and makes love to him. In the morning he wanders through the streets of the city while the city is being bombed, with fires raging everywhere and civilians running for their lives. He finally finds the man he is looking for, but the bombing resumes and they have to run breathless through the city's ruins until they reach the mans' cinemateque. He tried to develop the three reels in his small laboratory but he too failed. The exhausted and delirious filmmaker accuses the poor archivist of having kept the reels and their "gaze" prisoners. Then the filmmaker collapses and we hear the archivist's soliloquy in German. When the filmmaker wakes up, the archivist is gone and his daughter is looking for him. The filmmaker has his first encounter with the lost reels. When the archivist comes back, the filmmaker begs him to try again to develop the ancient reels. Meanwhile, the filmmaker helps a child get some water outside, a dangerous operation that involves using a manhole to cross the street. The archivist succeeds and shows the filmmaker the developed reels. They look at them together, laugh and hug, but we don't get to see what they see. Now the developed reels need to dry. The filmmaker and the archivist go for a walk, exiting the building from a hole in the wall made by a bomb. The streets are safe because a thick fog makes it impossible for snipers to see and aim. The archivist tells him that days of fog are happy days for the inhabitants of the city. In fact, they pass by musicians playing Vivaldi's Concerto in D Minor, by actors performing Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet", and by people dancing to modern music. The daughter invites the filmmaker to dance with her. She wants to leave that place, he promises that he will come back for her. Then everybody starts walking towards the river, but trouble lurking behind the fog. The archivist tells him to wait and runs towards his family. We hear women screaming, shots, bodies thrown in the river, and finally a car leaving. The filmmaker has remained hidden in the fog, powerless to stop the massacre. He crawls among the corpses, sobbing and moaning: the archivist, his daughter and everybody else has been killed. In the last scene he is crying in front of a projector, perhaps after finishing viewing the lost film, and is thinking about the endless journey of humankind.

Mia Aioniotita Kai Mia Mera/ Eternity and a Day (1998), starring Bruno Ganz (Mastroianni had died in 1996), is basically a poem about a poet who could not finish a poem that had been left unfinished by another poet, as in an endless chain of failures that represents the human condition. It is a tale of desperation, about a man who is trying to make amend for not having loved by loving the only person he can love on his last day. He spends his last day with a stranger, a very young stranger, from a different country and a different time, whose tragic memories are being built. The film is a chronicle of the old man's journey towards death. His last day is a desperate attempt at discovering the meaning of life before venturing into the ultimate unknown; at understanding how time passes and how it ends. His memory fails to comfort him, and so he clings on to a child who might hold the secret to life. The whole film feels like a Shakespearian soliloquy, in which the protagonist reflects about his personal tragedy while mirroring the bigger tragedy of the human condition. What triggers the soliloquy is the letters that the protagonist's wife (Anna) wrote in the old days, and that the protagonist (Alexander) has just given to his daughter (Katerina) to read. There is some kind of psychological dislocation going on: technically speaking, it is Katerina who is reading the letters and we hear them in Anna's voice and we hear them while we watch Alexander live his last day. A number of surreal dream-like scenes add to the mystery of what is going on in his mind: are those scenes mere dreams, are they filtered through his torment, or are they literally so weird because the world around him has become weird? Note that in the flashbacks of his childhoods we see the protagonist as a child but in the flashbacks of his marriage we see him as he is now, an old man in a shabby coat. The filmmaker abolishes temporal and spatial boundaries, and by removing boundaries he let the viewer experience history in a more personal way, to participate in a more direct way.

Children at a beach house. Not shown, they chat about grandfather, the ancient city sunk by an earthquake, and what is time. A child wakes up and walks out on tiptoe, while a woman is laughing in another room. He runs to te beach and goes swimmoing with two childmates. A woman's voice calls "Alexander"!
An old man, Alexander, in a different room, in a house by the sea, is saying goodbye to his affectionate helper, Urania. It is his last day before he enters a hospital where he is condemned to die of a terminal illness. The room is spare and bare, as opposed to the nice luxuriant room of his childhood. There are ships in the sea. The man stares outside, at the apartments across from his. Someone always answers him by playing the same music that he plays, but he never found out who she or he is, and why she or he does it. Alexander reasons that it must be someone who enjoys playing with the unknown. Addressing Anna, his late wife, Alexander regrets that he didn't accomplish more than just words (he is a writer).
As he drives his car through the city, he sees foreign children who wipe the windshields of the cars that stop at traffic lights. When the cops arrive and chase the children, Alexander saves one by letting him into his car and driving away. The child doesn't speak Greek. Alexander drops him off and then proceeds to his daughter's house. Katerina lives in a luxury apartment. He would like to leave her his dog but without telling her where he's going. He gives Katerina her mother's letters, that were addressed to him in a highly poetic style. Katerina's husband doesn't want animals (so presumably he doesn't leave the dog with them). It turns out that Alexander has been working on a poem since his wife died. It was to be the continuation and completion of a poem left unfinished by Greece's national poet, Solomos, in the 19th century.
As Katerina starts reading a letter, Alexander starts hearing the voice of the dead woman. He now is with Anna, who just had the baby Katerina. They are at the beach house and they are receiving guests for a party. As we see the scene in the past we hear Anna reading the letter that she wrote back them. Basically, the letter is telling us what was going on in her subcnscious while we see how she was acting (apparently normal). Notably, Alexander is not in the scene. He is merely an observer.
Back to his daugher's elegantly furnished apartment ( emanating the lifestyle of a young urban professional), Katerina's husband Nikos rudely informs him that they have sold the beach house and that it will be demolished.
Outside he sees the child again, being brutalized by two gangsters. Alexander follows their car to a ruined building by the sea. A nice bus unloads a group of well-dressed people who head into the basement. Alexander mixes with them. There are English-speaking people who stare at the children lined up aganst a wall, choose the ones they want to adopt. One of the children escapes and in the confusion that ensues Alexander grabs his little friend and takes him away, after leaving some money for the gnagsters. Not a word is said.
They are two hours from the Albanian border. It turns out the child does speak Greek. Alexander puts the child on a bus but the child gets off right away, and Alexander decides to drive the child back home.
At the border the child tells his the story of how his friend Selim got killed. Then they walk towards the border. The fence is littered with corpses of people who tried to climb it, who are still hanging from it, frozen, surrounded by snow and fog. A soldier in a mantle comes out of the gate. Alexander changes his mind and runs away with the child. They stop by a river where Alexander gives the child a history lesson about Solomos, the poet who never finished the poem. The poet materializes, dressed in period clothes and speaking (or, better, meditating) in Italian (because that's where he lived in his youth). The film shifts to a reconstruction of life in Italy in those years, almost like a historical costume drama.
Now a long meditation begins during which the child is forgotten: everyting is happening only in Alexander's mind.
They stop in a town where a bride is leading a procession. The people who follow her are carrying their chairs. She's dancing at the tune of an accordion. Everybody else is walking in silence. Alexader walks into the scene and meets Urania. It is her son who is getting married. Alexander wants to leave her the dog. Alexander departs and the bride and groom resume their dance, and the spectators are still surprisingly still and silent. It all feels like a dream.
Staring at the sea from a boardwalk, Alexander starts talking to Anna and finds himself walking (an old man) on a yacht with young people on holiday. He talks to his mother, old and sick, while a youthful Anna is dancing with their young friends. We hear the voice of Anna who writes a letter/diary about her love for him (what she really thought while she was on that holiday). The whole group then walks on the beach, everybody dressed in white except him and his mother. Anna goes with the young ones, while Alexander climbs a cliff.
We slowly learn that he is a famous writer, who has written many books, and that he neglected his wife for his books.
Back to the boardwalk, he meets his doctor, the doctor who told him that he is dying.
Finally Alexander comes back to himself and realizes that the child is missing. He finds him crying. The child too is haunted by memories. Alexander takes him to the morgue to visit his dead friend Selim.
The child holds a memorial for Selim in an empty warehouse with the other children. The children ask Selim about the trip that he has started in the other world. The child cries in front of a fire.
It is getting dark. Alexander walks along in the street through heavy traffic. He enters a nursing home. His mother is a patient there. He remembers another day at the beach. His mother has set the table for lunch but it starts raining and they have to run away. As usual, in this flashback he is himself in the present (an old man dressed in his usual clothes). He runs towards Anna and they hug and kiss in the rain.
Alexander is desperately trying to find a perfect day in his life, a day to treasure on his last day. Back to his mother's apartment, she mumbles something about her dowry: she is gone crazy. He asks her "Why must we rot?"
As he walks out, the child says goodbye. Alexander begs him to stay. They wander around at night, and run into a mass demonstration by communists. Three musicians board their bus with their instruments ad start performing classical music while the bus is moving.
Then the poet, Solomos, boards the bus and starts reciting his poem. Alexader asks him "How long does tomorrow last?"
The child finally boards a ship to Albania (or, better, sneaks into a crate that is beng loaded on the ship).
Alexander stops at a traffic light and doesn't move when the traffic light turns green. Whe the sun rises, his car is still at the same traffic light. He suddenly wakes up and drives through the red light.
He walks into an empty building: the beach house, hearing the voice of Anna writing from the sea, longing for his attention. The balcony door opens and his mother is rocking the cradle of Katerina while people dressed in white are singing by the sea. Anna calls Alexander to dance with her. He tells her that he doesn't want to go to the hospital. He wants to live tomorrow. And maybe the unknown neighbor will respond with the same music. He asks her how long tomorrow lasts. She replies "an eternity and a day". She leaves him and he remains alone shouting at the waves.
The last sound of the film is the voice of his mother calling him as a child (from the first scene).

The sprawling To Livadi Pou Dakryzei/ The Weeping Meadow (2004), his first film without Arvanitis, is an anguished historical tale and a portfolio of evoctive photography. In order to achieve both, the director has to reimagine the world as it was, notably though an incredibly detailed reconstruction of village life at the beginning of the film. Initially what feeds the story is a recursive entangling of nostalgic oneiric Fellini-an scenes with the Shakespeare-ian leitmotiv of the betrayed father. Then history takes over, and the film becomes the typical historical meditation, contrasting the small dramas of ordinary people with the big dramas of ideologies. We are never told what causes the waters to rise and submerge the old village, but that becomes the ultimate metaphor of the film.

In 1919 a group of well-dressed Greek refugees, expelled from the Ukraine by the advancing communists, are led by a middle-aged man Spyros and his wife Danae to the edge of a river. The invisible narrating voiceover tells their odyssey from the other side of the river. Then the voice shifts to the leader of the group, who talks about his two children. The girl, Eleni, is not his: she is now an orphan. They were told to move to the edge of the river.
Fast forward to the years when Eleni has become a young woman. The community has built a cute village by the river. The children are excited when they hear that a boat is taking Eleni back to the village. She is escorted to Spyros' house. She is weak and melancholy. It turns out she got pregnant by Spyros' son, with whom she grew up, and went away to give birth to twin babies, Yorgis and Yannis. Spyros knows nothing. When she found out, Danae arranged for Eleni to spend a few months with her sister in the nearby city and then for the twins to be adopted. The only other person who knows the truth is Spyros' sister. The boy also knows: he overheard the women talk. He comes at night in secret to check how Eleni is doing.
Fast forward a few years later. Danae died in an epidemic. Spyros fell in love with his adopted daughter Eleni and forced her to marry him. They got married in a church but the moment the priest said "amen" the girl elopes with Spyros' son. The two flag down the car of the traveling musicians who were playing at the wedding, Nikos' troupe, and, instead of turning them in, the musicians give them a ride to the big city. Nikos gives them a room in the abandoned theater where he camps with his family. Eleni and the boy find out where the children live and spy on them secretely. The old senile Spyros, in the meantime, has not given up: he finds out where they live and comes to claim his wife. He shouts on the stage of the theater like a dramatic actor that she's his wife and everybody pities him. Nikos escorts them to a village where many musicians live. All the time they fear that Spyros will take his revenge. Nikos' dream is to emigrate to the USA. The boy is a gifted accordionist but they live in poverty. Nikos asks him to travel with his band and he accepts. There aren't many engagements and the musicians are willing to play anywhere for a little bit of money. The first stop is dreadful though: the joint where they were scheduled to perform has shut down. The musicians are demoralized. On the train back home the usually good-humored Nikos starts weeing like a child. Another band leader, Markos, wants to hire the kid as an accordionist for a tour in America. Nikos is excited but Eleni is not and runs away, while young revolutionaries are shouting in the street about a national strike. In the evening she puts on the white dress of the wedding, packs her suitcase, walks to the beach and dances with a group of men while waiting for the boat that will take her back to Spyros' village. Spyros' son finds her in time and swears he would never "betray" her. She obviously wants to stay near her children. In fact, Eleni and Spyros' son become friends with the family that adopted their children and are allowed to hang out with Yorgis and Yannis, who are now old enough to understand. One day Eleni cries when Yorgix calls her "mom".
Years later the musicians are siding with the leftists who preach illegally to the workers. Nikos is determined to stage the trade uion dance even though the usual venues are afraid of the police. Nikos' band performs for a small crowd. In the middle of the dance Spyros enters the room and asks to dance with Eleni (technically his wife) while his son plays the accordion for them. At the end of the dance he collapses to the floor, dead. The funeral takes place on a raft in the river with the whole village lined up along the bank of the river, each family in its own boat. Then all the boats follow the raft into the sea. When the son and Eleni walk through the streets of the village, nobody is out: the inhabitants stare at them from the windows of their homes. Something weird is going on: his father's sheep have been killed and hanged on the tallest tree. Spyros' ultimate madness.
Now the couple can move into the parental house in the village and definitely reunite with their children. However, they are surrounded by a hostile population, as they are guilty of having broken the code of honor. Eleni is playing with the children when someone starts throwing stones and breaking the windows of the room. When the village is flooded, nobody offers a boat to them until the following day. The flooded village looks like a little Venice with all those boats in streets that look like canals. When they reach higher ground with all the other families, nobody talks to them. The women dance together around bonfires in a pagan-Christian ritual but nobody sits around the fire of Spyros' son and Eleni. When the villagers assemble in their boats in the middle of the river, Spyros' son and Eleni are left out to watch from a distance. It is almost as if the village blamed the couple for the flood.
Meanwhile, the revolution has failed and the fascists are arresting the leftists. Eleni fears for her man, but he is spared. The traveling musicians appear out of the blue, performing a mournful tune among white bedsheets hung to dry by the sea. The kid and Eleni hug in front of them. Someone shoots. Nikos is killed.
The kid (he is never called by his name Alexis) decides to leave with Markos' band for America. In the middle of the night the police come and arrest Eleni while the children are sleeping. She is released only at the end of World War II. The director of the prison, escorting her out, talks to her in ominous terms about one of her sons turned soldier and gives her a letter that her husband sent her four years earlier. He had enlisted in the army of the USA in order to obtain citizenship and be able to bring his family to the USA. The war dispersed her family like nothing previously had: she collapses after taking a few steps outside the prison.
Taking a train, she returns to her native village. She is one of the many women who are delivered by the authorities the corpses of their fathers, sons, lvoers and husbands on a beach. She is dragged unconscious into a house by two women who used to know her. They feel bad for how they treated her in the old days. Eleni lies delirious for a while, obsessed that all those years she had no paper to write a letter to her children. When she wakes up, one of the ladies tell her what happened to her sons: they fought on different sides in the civil war and were both killed.
The old lady takes Eleni to the place where the battle raged between the two sides. A flashback shows Yannis looking for Yorgis, now a captain in the opposite army, on hill that separates the two armies. They hug and kiss, but then each returns to his own side. Yannis was killed in that battle, Yorgis died later (committed suicide?) in the paternal house and his body still lies there. The village is now completely submerged by the waters. Eleni takes a boat to her old house. While she climbs the steps of the house, we hear the last letter that her husband wrote to her from the Pacific islands just before his last battle. She cries over Yorgis' body.

The Dust of Time (2008) is a simpler elegiac film.

The central metaphor of Angelopoulos' cinema was the traveling. His films are epic travelogues through space and time. By traveling, one explores the landscape and can discover the scars of history. This kind of journey has an hallucinatory quality.

Angelopoulos was killed in a traffic accident in january 2012.

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