Theo Angelopoulos RIP

[Nick Dando]

The Guardian, via AP, is reporting the death of Theo Angelopoulos in a car accident.

Filmmaker Theo Angelopoulos dies in accident | Film | guardian.co.uk

Nick

Filmmaker Theo Angelopoulos dies in accident

Greek filmmaker known for his slow and dreamlike style was killed in a road accident while working on his latest movie

• Associated Press
  
• guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 24 January 2012 23.36 GMT

Greek film director Theodoros Angelopouos has died after being hit by a motorcycle during filming of his latest movie. Photograph: Orestis Panagiotou/EPA

Theo Angelopoulos, an award-winning Greek filmmaker known for his slow and dreamlike style as a director, has been killed in a road accident while working on his latest movie. He was 76.
Police and hospital officials said Angelopoulos suffered serious head injuries and died at a hospital after being hit by a motorcycle while walking across a road near a movie set near Athens' main port of Piraeus.
The driver, also injured and hospitalised, was later identified as an off-duty police officer.
The accident occurred while Angelopoulos was working on his upcoming movie "The Other Sea."
Angelopoulos had won numerous awards for his movies, mostly at European film festivals, during a career that spanned more than 40 years.
In 1995, he won the Grand Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival for "Ulysses' Gaze," starring American actor Harvey Keitel.

[Nick Dando]

There is also a series of film clips.

Theo Angelopoulos: a career in clips | Film | guardian.co.uk

Nick

[Nick Dando]

From the Guardian Film blog.

Theo Angelopoulos: one last unfinished tale for chronicler of modern Greece | Film | guardian.co.uk

Nick

Theo Angelopoulos: one last unfinished tale for chronicler of modern Greece
Incompleteness was a recurrent theme for a film-maker who thought closure out of reach, always searching for the lost idyll of a nation torn apart by the 20th century



Theo Angelopoulos has been killed in a traffic accident while crossing a busy street in the middle of filming. This very fact has an enormous irony and poignancy: so much of his work is about the unfinished story, the unfinished journey, the unfinished life, and the realisation that to be unfinished is itself part of the human mystery and an essential human birthright and burden. This was part of what he conveyed to audiences, in a cinematic style that was poetry and epic poetry, steeped in the tumult of Greek history from the time of the second world war, and yet his movies were anything but frenzied or dramatic. They addressed not history's surface action but its spiritual causes and effects; he created long, dreamlike takes in long, dreamlike films, visual compositions of great beauty and delicacy, and a tempo that was largo, rising occasionally to adagio.

"This story will never get finished," says a young girl, Voula, to her brother Alexandros, at the beginning of 1988's Landscape in the Mist. The story she is trying to tell him keeps getting interrupted by the appearance of their mother, and as the siblings try to unravel the painful mystery of their father's whereabouts in Germany, Angelopoulos appears to be saying that a human story is broken at both ends: a clear, definitive closure is out of reach in front of us and behind us, with our beginnings also shrouded in mist.

His latest film was to be The Other Sea, a film that reportedly addressed the crisis of modern Greece. Will this film be finished now? Did the director leave notes that might enable someone else to do this? (It could be that the insurance necessary for the shoot provided for precisely this.) His death comes at a time when a new Greek cinema has been exciting international audiences on the festival circuit, with movies from young film-makers such as Giorgios Lanthimos and Athina Rachel Tsangari. But their work is entirely different from Angelopoulos's. Perhaps Béla Tarr might be willing to take it over – there are growing suggestions online to this effect – but it would be a mistake to compare these directors on the basis of a superficial resemblance in editing and pace. Angelopoulos was soaked in Greek history and culture; Tarr might well be astonished at the idea.

In Eternity and a Day (1998), Bruno Ganz plays a dying poet whose lifelong obsession has been to complete a 19th-century unfinished poem entitled The Free Besieged. In Ulysses' Gaze (1995), Harvey Keitel plays a director searching for three lost reels by the pioneering Macedonian film-makers Ianachia and Milton Manaki. Perhaps both these characters sense any completion that might result from their endeavours would in fact create a new incompletion – that of their own life and work, a baton passed forwards into an unknowable future.

An enormous amount of Angelopoulos's work was about the decline of modern Greece and the dwindling of its rural communities; the idea of returning to the old country, to find villages shrunk almost to nothing, is a prominent trope. Modern Greece itself has been fractured by the violence of the 20th century and on a larger historical scale it has become marginal, no longer the epicentre of classical civilisation whose language transmitted great poetry and the New Testament. Angelopoulos's films reflected this but also, I think, attempted in some way to strike back, to reassert the lost epic grandeur with huge, slow-moving films of classic amplitude.

In The Travelling Players, from 1974, a troupe of itinerant actors drifted around the war-torn country, always trying and failing to perform the folk tale Golfo the Shepherdess. They are the witnesses to the episodic tragedy of the nation, and yet mysteriously undeterred in their vocation simply to perform a kind of prehistoric myth. Angelopoulos stood back from history, often showing vast crowd scenes in longshot, especially in 2004's The Weeping Meadow, in which the figures look like chess-pieces, or perhaps even smaller, like a buzzing array of molecules. Human beings, so agitated and anxious, look like the inhabitants of a disturbed beehive – another implication of his 1986 film The Beekeeper.

Ultimately, Angelopoulos's themes are the great themes of exile and return, and the equivalent interior, spiritual sense of alienation and longing for peace. They connect with another great Greek trope: the wanderings of Odysseus. Angelopoulos's work was recurrently about this endless journeying towards a home receding over the horizon. Ulysses's gaze was Angelopoulos's gaze – long, steady and profoundly mysterious.

[Rindulus]

I liked his movies. Sad news.

[Nick Dando]

The Guardian obituary.

Theo Angelopoulos | Film | The Guardian

Nick

Theo Angelopoulos
Magisterial Greek film director whose work focused on historical and political allegories
Ronald Bergan
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 25 January 2012 16.00 GMT


The Greek film director Theo Angelopoulos, who has died aged 76 in a road accident, was an epic poet of the cinema, creating allegories of 20th-century Greek history and politics. He redefined the slow pan, the long take and tracking shots, of which he was a master. His stately, magisterial style and languidly unfolding narratives require some (ultimately rewarding) effort on the part of the spectator. "The sequence shot offers, as far as I'm concerned, much more freedom," Angelopoulos explained. "By refusing to cut in the middle, I invite the spectator to better analyse the image I show him, and to focus, time and again, on the elements that he feels are the most significant in it."

Angelopoulos was born in Athens, where he studied law. After military service, he went to Paris to attend the Sorbonne but soon dropped out to study at the IDHEC film school (now known as La Fémis). Back in Greece, he worked as a film critic for the leftist daily Allagi, which was closed down by the military junta that came to power in 1967. The seven-year regime of "the colonels" was seared into his consciousness and remained a subject – overtly or subliminally – throughout his oeuvre.

His elliptical style was born partly out of the restrictive atmosphere of the epoch during which he managed to make his first feature, Reconstruction (1970). Shot in spare, high-contrast black and white, it was about a Greek migrant worker who returns from Germany and is murdered by his wife and her lover. It was immediately clear that the director was less interested in the crime story than the ideological, individual and collective implications of the murder inquiry.

Angelopoulos then emerged on the international scene with his impressive historical triptych, Days of '36 (1972), The Travelling Players (1975) and The Hunters (1977), the most ambitious Greek films to date. Shot by Giorgos Arvanitis, the cinematographer on almost all of Angelopoulos's films, they are long, contemplative studies of modern Greek history.

Days of '36, based on actual events, tells of a man arrested for the murder of a trade unionist. Protesting his innocence, he holds a politician hostage in his cell, threatening to kill the man, and himself, unless he is released. The film subtly undermined the military regime in its portrayal of official incompetence. Given its physical confines, and the fact that the prisoner remains out of sight for much of the time, the high level of tension is a real achievement.

In The Travelling Players, set in 1952, a troupe of actors recall Greek political history and their own personal histories since they last visited the country, in 1939. Nearly four hours long, the film consists of just 131 shots, allowing the audience time to assess the situation rationally. The Hunters follows the eponymous group across a snowy mountainside in northern Greece as they come across the body of a Greek guerrilla fighter killed in 1949. At the subsequent inquest, each member of the group, as well as various peasants and workers, speaks of his experience of the civil war and the years that followed. Shot in pastel shades, the film slowly unravels the various strands in this inquisition of the right, using dream, memory and fantasy, and the powerful symbol of the corpse as the silent accuser.

In Voyage to Cythera (1984), the first of what Angelopoulos called the "trilogy of silence", an old man who fought with the communists during the civil war returns to Greece after more than 30 years' exile in the Soviet Union. He attempts to come to terms with his country and his wife and family, whom he hardly knows. The second, The Beekeeper (1986), was the first of Angelopoulos's films to use well-known actors, in this case Marcello Mastroianni as a morose, retired schoolteacher who sets off on a trip around the beehive sites of Greece, picking up an enigmatic young woman hitchhiker on the way.

This compelling film could be called a metaphysical road movie, as could Landscape in the Mist (1988), the third in the sequence and the first of his films to feature children. Here, a 14-year-old girl and her little brother embark on a journey to find their father, whom they believe to be in Germany. In fact, it is an existential odyssey, a voyage towards the unattainable.

Harvey Keitel starred in Ulysses' Gaze (1995) as another character who returns to Greece from exile. He is a film-maker, back from the US, seeking some lost reels of films made by two famous Greek film-makers during the silent era. The film won the grand jury prize at Cannes. Uncharacteristically, Angelopoulos expressed his disappointment that it did not win the Palme d'Or. He told a shocked and suddenly silent audience: "If this is what you have to give me, I have nothing to say," before walking off the stage without even posing for pictures.

Cannes made amends three years later when Eternity and a Day (1998) won the festival's top prize. The film is a philosophical meditation about a dying writer, played by Bruno Ganz, and his thoughts on family, art and mortality. Angelopoulos executes the transition between present and past brilliantly, gliding easily between uncertain reality and nostalgia.

The Weeping Meadow (2004) was the first of what Angelopoulos planned as a trilogy. The mytho-poetic dimension of the film – a magical fusion of colours, sounds, music and images which expresses the deepest feelings surrounding life and death – is linked, as usual, to a strong political and social context. The film spans 30 years of Greek history, from the exodus of the Greek colony in Odessa under the threat of the Red Army in 1919 to the end of the civil war in 1949.

The Dust of Time (2008) covered the second part of the 20th century, venturing outside Greece for the first time. The Greek-German-Italian-Russian co-production, mainly in English, had all the makings of a Europudding, albeit one made by a master chef. Not all these fears were allayed. The Dust of Time is a fin-de-siècle drama, a cry of pain derived from the wounds inflicted during the previous century.

Angelopoulos's latest film, The Other Sea, was to be about Greece's financial crisis. While filming in Athens' main port, Piraeus, he was in collision with a motorcycle as he crossed a road. He died later in hospital.

He is survived by his wife, Phoebe.

• Theodoros Angelopoulos, film director, born 27 April 1935; died 24 January 2012

[moonfleet]

Theo Angelopoulos