David Parkinson applauds four deeply personal films of myth, memory and odyssey from the great Greek director: Ulysses' Gaze, Eternity and a Day, The Weeping Meadow and The Dust of Time.
A master of composition, Theo Angelopoulos ranks among the last of the great film philosophers. In classic Greek fashion, his work melds myth, memory and odyssey and his most recent outings have all been deeply personal voyages of (re)discovery.
In Ulysses' Gaze (1995), returning film-maker Harvey Keitel searches for lost movies by the pioneering Manakia brothers, who recorded a Balkans whose turn-of-the-century transition mirrors that of the post-Communist era. Another traveller reconnects with the past in hoping for a better future in Eternity and a Day (1998), as ailing poet Bruno Ganz communes with dead wife Isabell Renauld while rescuing young Achileas Skevis from a brutal adoption racket. Finally, the focus falls on an emblematic couple in the first parts of a projected trilogy, which sees Nikos Poursadinis and Alexandra Aidini run away together in a 1930s take on the legend of Paris and Helen in The Weeping Meadow (2004) and Michel Piccoli and Irène Jacob encourage director son Willem Dafoe to produce a picture about history's impact on the individual in Dust of Time (2008).
Theo Angelopoulos is Greece's most celebrated filmmaker and one of the world's great directors, his body of work examining the history of modern Greece from a social and political perspective. This third volume of his films contains Ulysses' Gaze, Eternity and a Day, The Weeping Meadow and The Dust of Time.
Harvey Keitel stars in Ulysses' Gaze (1995) as a Greek filmmaker journeying across the Balkans to return home after 35 years, confronting various demons from his past along the way.
In Eternity and a Day (1998), ailing Greek poet Alexander (Bruno Ganz) is preparing to put his affairs in order, resigned to the fact that he is not long for this world. After a visit to his daughter, however, Alexander finds himself thinking of his late wife, remembering happier times. When he encounters a small boy who has been abducted by an illegal adoption ring, Alexander determines to rescue the child and return him to his home. En route he rediscovers his zest both for writing and life itself, making an inspiring journey of self-discovery in which past and present are intertwined.
The Weeping Meadow (2004) is the first film in Angelopoulos' loosely-connected 'Dust of Time' trilogy. The film traces the childhood love affair of Spyros and Eleni, two children from Odessa who grow up in a refugee encampment near Thessaloniki in the 1920 and 30s. As they grow up together, the two fall in love - but war is looming and difficult times lie ahead.
The second film in the trilogy, The Dust of Time (2008), continues the love story of Spyros and Eleni (played in this instalment by Michel Piccoli and Irene Jacob). Willem Dafoe stars as A, the couple's son, an American-born filmmaker who sets out to make an autobiographical film charting his life story from the day he was born in 1953 until the present day. Sifting through long-buried memories, A drifts into a dream-like narrative that unfolds in the former Soviet Union, the Austrian-Hungarian borders, Italy and New York, and takes in historical events from Stalin's death to Nixon's resignation and the fall of the Greek junta.
