Theo Angelopolous R.I.P

:-(

Weirdly enough a piece discussing his films (here) just came out this month, was re-reading it earlier today.

Was watching Travelling Players over Xmas, its a great film.

Really liked that he closed his eyes to decide how long a shot had to last (talk about a director having a great eye or whatever). TP's whole history is fascinating: that back-and-forth between a symbolism conceived from repression to a v direct tell.

aargh misspelt his name - mod help!

gonna sit down w/ Ulysses' Gaze and Landscape in the Mist sometime this week; I like that there seems to be an almost total lack of consensus as to his best work.

alas, I've only seen Ulysses' Gaze and... he must've done better.

gonna sit down w/ Ulysses' Gaze and Landscape in the Mist sometime this week; I like that there seems to be an almost total lack of consensus as to his best work.

― Simon H., Wednesday, 25 January 2012 21:08 (14 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

ha, yes; I never got around to him & I think I would've had I ever been compelled to choose The Suspended Step of the Stork over Landscape, etc. gonna try one of these soon, too.

yeah, that's not among his best by any means.

the ones i'd recommend are: landscape in the mist, suspended step of the story, voyage to cythera.

almost all of his films are very self-serious political allegories, heavily symbolic with tons of longueurs. so they aren't for everyone, and i think there are aspects of all of his films i find kind of hard to swallow (they get really portentous in the 1990s, and i find ulysses gaze really really hard to swallow; eternity and a day is a bit better). but the devil's in the details, and he is one of great masters of staging and cinematography and maintaining a specific, intense but still somehow wandering, tone throughout a very long film.

he's usually described as being in the lineage of antonioni, but i think he made more good or even great films than the master -- at least they are more specific and pointed in their politics, and more achieved stylistically.

xpost

and it's a fucking tragedy how this guy died. awful.

Yes, it took me ages to get into Angelopolous because of his portentousness. I had to mentally frame him as somebody being deliberating portentous - upholding the tradition, the possibility, of being portentous - as a way in. That and falling in love with Jancso and wanting to find someone who consistently did something with Jancso's ideas.

Still have yet to properly tackle him. I, like a lot of people I imagine, am looking weirdly at the Artificial Eye collections of his work that had just arrived the day before.

there seems to be an almost total lack of consensus as to his best work.

― Simon H., Wednesday, January 25, 2012 9:08 PM (2 hours ago)

travelling players has some supporters

the consensus seems to be that he made a lot of worthy films. it's not like people who like ulysses gaze are saying landscape in the mist is a shitstorm and vice-versa. his body of work is unusually consistent for better and for worse. he always made "elephant art" in a fashion but that tendency seems to really blow up in the mid-1990s just as the political content of his work seems to get less specific and more dubious.

i haven't seen dust of time though.

traveling players is his most obvious play for significance, at least before ulysses' gaze. it's a vastly ambitious film which _almost_ lives up to its ambitions and for that reason it's easily heralded as a masterpiece. it has some astonishing stuff in it, although it feels a little bit like a programmatic art film in a lot of ways to me.

but yeah if you're looking for somewhere to start i'd say go with landscape in the mist or voyage to cythera. these are probably his least pretentious films (after days of 36, which is a bit rough and not as characteristic) and if you like them you can go on from there. but if you find them too bombastic/slow/whatever, you should probably move on.

i keep reflecting on how this conversation was prompted by a really hideous event.

It always seems to be the case.

there seems to be an almost total lack of consensus as to his best work.

― Simon H., Wednesday, January 25, 2012 9:08 PM (2 hours ago)

travelling players has some supporters

― The term “hipster racism” from Carmen Van Kerckhove at Racialicious (nakhchivan), Wednesday, 25 January 2012 Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

In the S&S artcile linked above it talks about the period in the 90s that as a kind of peak.

otoh, it may be more focused on bcz he got Harvey Keitel in the film.

Not seen any others but in what way does Travelling Players feel like some kind of 'programmatic art film'? Where do you start feeling cynical about the horrible events he talks about. What I liked about it was how un-symbolic it was prepared to be, to just talk about what was going on in Greece in a direct way.

Like to point people to this novel. One letter is devoted to the Miaojin's discovery of TA's work, via The Travelling Players.

Has a lot of things in it but if you're a 'slow cinema' kinda fan there are bits and pieces on that (Tarkovsky also features).