Indian Film Culture - 16.cdr - federation of film societies of india

looked eastward for the emergence of new
gospels. But by the time he made O
Megalexandros (1980), the story of a failed
peasant revolt and its fiery leader, he was
beginning to waver, shocked by the corrupting
effect of power which shattered the bestintentioned
principles. Voyage to Cythera
(1984) and The Beekeeper (O melissokomes,
1986), were both heartbreaking portraits of
idealists deprived of their ideals, Landscape in
the Mist (1988) offered a desolate image of
Greece helplessly seeking its salvation
elsewhere. The Suspended Step of the Stork
(1991) clearly announced the theme that was to
preoccupy him for the rest of his life: the vast,
ever-growing masses of refugees, victims of
political upheavals and economic catastrophes,
homeless, nationless crowds looking for a
shelter they are consistently denied. With
Ulysses' Gaze(1995) he fully crossed the
borders out of his own homeland and put to
sleep, once and for all, his communist illusions
in the magnificent funeral cortege of Lenin's
statue prostrate on a Danube barge, and painted
the war-torn Balkans in all their misery. Many
believed the film deserved Cannes' Golden
Palm, Jeanne Moreau's jury that year thought
otherwise, but at least the festival paid its dues
the next time around, when Eternity and a
Day(1998) got the main award.
In The Weeping Meadow (2004) and the
following The Dust of Time (2008) (two parts of
a trilogy that was never completed),
Angelopoulos summed up the entire 20th
century, in his own way, painting not only
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personal despair, anguish and tragedies, but also
the ideological calamities which shook the
world through it. The Other Sea was supposed to
be his first glimpse at the Third Millennium and
its moral conundrums and again, no silver lining
to the numerous clouds in sight, either.
But if ideas can be expressed in words, there is
another dimension in Theo Angelopoulos' films
that goes much further, those magic moments of
pure emotion which no words can describe,
recurring again and again, a poetry of the image
in time that very few, if any other filmmaker,
achieved. An old man and an old woman on a
raft drifting away from the shore in Voyage to
Cythera, a shocking, silent rape scene, where all
you see is the back of a truck and yet you know
exactly what's going on in Landscape in the
Mist, the ceasefire in the fog in Ulysses' Gaze,
the bus ride in Eternity and the Day, the flight
from the flooded villages in The Weeping
Meadow, Michel Piccoli entering a Berlin bar at
one end and coming out, years later, at the other
end, all in one shot, in The Dust of Time.
Disparate, random choices out of countless
examples, for every Angelopoulos sequence
shot was a unique event on its own. Shortly
before he died, the great Russian cellist,
musician an humanist Mstislav Rostropovich
said death doesn't worry him, for he knows that
his dear friends Prokofiev, Shostakovich and
Britten will be waiting for him on the other side.
Hopefully, Theo Angelopoulos is now
discussing the affairs of this world and the next
one, with his dear Kurosawa and Antonioni. He
hasn't lost that much, we have.
June 2012
Indian Film Culture