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For filmmakers as for
comedians, dying is easy—creating is hard. Those with the good sense
to opt for a tragically early departure can gain much from the
transaction. Not only does their work acquire a coherent narrative
line and a tangible set of clichés for their immortalizers to
endlessly dissect (think Pasolini, Fassbinder, Tarkovsky), but their
talent is cut off before it threatens to go on the wane. Those
filmmakers unfortunate or stubborn enough to refrain from kicking
off, however, can have a subtler and more insidious death visited
upon them: the black holes of distributional ignorance and critical
inattention that continue to keep so much important work from North
American screens, a void only tenuously bridged by the specialized
environs of cinematheques and the global DVD market. How many false
narratives of cinematic lives have been forced upon us, how many
oeuvres reduced by the vagaries of distribution to a desultory
couple of highlights shorn of context and continuity? For such
continuity is necessary, vital. Even if the recent offerings of some
auteurs are condemned by chronology—and, perhaps, accomplishment—to
stand in the shadow of their beatified brothers, they are still
points of entry to the source of those masterworks. And as such they
are invaluable for giving us a glimpse, through the prism of an
artistic lifetime, of where the cinema has been and where it
continues to go.
It’s thus helpful that, with most of his work effectively
unavailable in North America and the only comprehensive DVD
collection outfitted exclusively with Japanese subtitles, Theo
Angelopoulos has been acting as his own personal archivist
throughout his 11 feature films. “The recycled figures, names,
themes within Angelopoulos’ work...begin to form, for the viewer,
one ‘metatext,’ one ‘megafilm’ in which the echoes from one play off
against those in another,” notes Andrew Horton in The Films of Theo
Angelopoulos, the only study of the director published in English.
Where Tarkovsky sculpted in time, Angelopoulos builds in space. As
Stanley Kauffmann wrote of Kiarostami, Angelopoulos regards cinema
“not as something to be made, but to be inhabited, as if it were
there always, like the world,” his intertwining classical, national,
and personal mythologies creating an aloof cinematic landscape in
the midst of the squabbles of the market, a country that waits
patiently to be discovered.
As Angelopoulos has taken his past firmly in hand, so has he taken
his future, conscious that the kind of cinema he represents is aging
with him: “I belong to a generation slowly coming to the end of our
careers,” he remarked in 1998. Clearly intending it as his
valedictory project, the near-septuagenarian master has now unveiled
the first part of a projected trilogy spanning the breadth of
20th-century Greek history. Trilogy: The Weeping Meadow follows the
fate of Eleni (Alexandra Aidini), an orphan first seen arriving in
1919 Thessaloniki with a flood of refugees fleeing from the Red
Army. Escaping from her adoptive father and would-be bridegroom
Spyros (Vasilis Kolovos), the teenaged Eleni elopes with Spyros’ son
Alexis (Nikos Poursanidis), suffering through the math and aftermath
of WWII only to encounter her ultimate (though assuredly not final)
tragedy in the Greek civil war of 1945-1950—roughly the same era
chronicled, imperishably, in The Travelling Players (1975).
It’s indeed hard to speak of any film of Angelopoulos’ without
making reference to that masterpiece, because for the great majority
of us deprived of seeing the full extent of his work, The Travelling
Players essentially is Angelopoulos: an epic both Brechtian and
romantic, creating in the space of its four hours and 80 shots a
cinema as weighty as it is ephemeral, a thereness to be occupied by
our bodies as it is regarded with our eyes. It’s thus inevitable
that the few, scattered later films available on these shores seem
less part of a metatext than the receding echoes of their towering
ancestor, a megafilm in its own right.
The prevalence of that false narrative is, unfortunately, little
served by Angelopoulos’ increasingly pompous grandiosity, onscreen
and in life—need we mention his notorious grumbling when Ulysses’
Gaze (1995) missed the top prize at Cannes?—as well as his rootless,
abstruse symbol-mongering: see particularly the veritable comic book
that is Eternity and a Day (1998), featuring Bruno Ganz’s
perpetually overcoated dying writer as a kind of art cinema
superhero. From the self-parodic title down to the belated Palme
d’Or, the latter film would seem to cap Angelopoulos’ legacy at its
plodding apex: the monumental has finally given way to monumentalism,
the last of the century’s cinema pachyderms is safely laid to rest.
Angelopoulos, however, seems unwilling to follow the script. So
another film, another narrative, another death. As soggy as its
title, The Weeping Meadow assumes its designated place as the latest
stage in Angelopoulos’ fossilization, his efforts to give the art of
shadows body and mass irretrievably weighing him down. For all its
prolonged moments of awe and beauty—a theatre-turned-refugee camp
with families living in curtained boxes and tented stalls, a
procession of rafts through a submerged village, a troupe of
musicians weaving in and out of a white maze of gently windblown
sheets—The Weeping Meadow is mired in the funereal; where Godard
makes elogies of his elegies, Angelopoulos sounds a sluggish dirge.
Small wonder that he finds little favour among those cineastes whom,
as Phillip Lopate notes, “breathlessly await new works by auteurs
whom they have identified as embodying cinema’s future. . . the more
unfinished the better, since they open up a fantasy space of
unlimited potential.” To this imagined future, Angelopoulos offers a
self-penned obituary-in-progress, a tripartite tombstone embedded
with tintype reproductions of former glories.
The book’s closed, then. We’ve cast our lot with the future, with
the Jias, Wongs, and Apichatpongs, leaving Angelopoulos’ archaic
meadow to weep itself dry. Our false narrative would be easily
fulfilled if such cavalier dismissals were all it took to dissipate
the slow wonder that remains—still remains—imprinted in Angelopoulos’
images. The power of Angelopoulos’ artistry is such that even
overcomes the diminishing ability of its possessor to wield it. As
with Godard in the beautiful, greyly receding dimensions of Notre
musique or Rivette with the endlessly regenerative fictive universe
of Histoire de Marie et Julien (2003), Angelopoulos has,
irrespective of his own efforts, acquired a depth granted with age,
sacrificing the striking clarity and precision of his earlier work
for a contemplative freedom of movement through the spaces which
those works had so memorably breached. The Weeping Meadow returns us
to an historical and artistic past that has never ceased to be
present in the work of its creator, an indissoluble form beyond the
constituent parts—as Marker suggested of Tarkovsky, an imaginary
house “where all the rooms open into one another and all lead to the
same corridor.” The work eludes the terminus its maker relentlessly
heads towards; the line submits to the circle, and we are again
immersed in the world it encompasses. Greater than boredom while
enduring The Weeping Meadow is gratitude for its return to that
distinctive space, that thereness, for the palpable presence of
films seen and unseen. If the future is growing narrower for
Angelopoulos and his generation, each new film reminds us how much
of their past still remains to be imagined.
From
Cinema Scope
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