Theo Angelopoulos

Theo Angelopoulos

Theo Angelopoulos was interviewed at the National Film Theatre on 25 November 2003.

Following a screening of one of his most widely praised films, Landscape in the Mist, we were thrilled to welcome Theo Angelopoulos to the NFT stage to give a rare public interview about his work and career. Hailed as a true master of modern film-making by writers as diverse as David Thomson and Frederick Jameson, Angelopoulos has evolved one of the most recognisably distinctive storytelling styles in the history of the cinema, involving an innovative treatment of time and space centred on long, fluid takes of extraordinary subtlety and beauty. As the centrepiece of our retrospective of his films, the multi-award-winning film-maker discussed this, his use of history and myth, and other matters with NFT programmer Geoff Andrew and members of the audience.

Interview © BFI 2003

Political protest and introduction

Prior to the screening of Landscape in the Mist and the arrival of Theo Angelopoulos, demonstrators invade the NFT auditorium and take to the stage in support of seven people - including Briton Simon Chapman - allegedly framed by Greek police and on hunger strike in prison. They request that a five-minute video tape, which they claim proves the prisoners' innocence, be screened. After some deliberation, NFT staff announce they are unable to screen the tape, but point out that the demonstrators have had plenty of time to make their feelings known to the audience; expressing a widespread sympathy with the demonstrators' concerns, NFT programmer Geoff Andrew promises as requested to hand the tape on to Theo Angelopoulos later in the evening. The group leaves the auditorium peacefully.

(As it happened, the following evening of Wednesday November 26, Simon Chapman and four other activists on hunger strike were released on bail by a panel of Greek judges, despite a recommendation to the contrary from the Greek public prosecutor. The judges also ordered the release of the two Greek minors arrested as riot suspects.)

Geoff Andrew: First, I'd like to welcome you this evening. I'm particularly pleased that we are able to welcome Theo here this month because we doing a season of films about 1968, which is the year he made his first feature. And as I hope most of our protesters realise, Theo is naturally a man of the Left, and his first feature was actually about somebody in prison. It's very appropriate that we are doing this season with him this month, especially as we also had Costa-Gavras here last week. Landscape in the Mist is one of his loveliest films, and that's why I thought it would be good to show before the interview, but the other films are great. I've been watching them all in preparation for tonight's interview and they really are quite special. I think he's probably the most distinctive film-maker at work today anywhere in the world because [after] five seconds you know it's his film. Nobody else creates a universe like Theo Angelopoulos.

I'd like to thank the Hellenic Foundation for Culture UK and their 'Greece in Britain' initiative - this is part of that - and also, of course, the Greek Embassy. I'd also like to thank Phoebe Economopoulos, Theo's partner and producer. Okay, I think we are ready to go. If there are any of you who are left who were involved in the protests, enjoy the evening but do please allow us to get on with our part of the evening now. I'm going to be sitting watching the film with you, at least until Theo arrives, so I hope you enjoy it as much as I always do.

[screening of Landscape in the Mist]

GA: I'd like to thank you for your patience as we are running a little late due to an incident early on which made the film start late. We'd better get on with things, so first I'd like to thank the Greek Embassy for their help in making this evening happen. I'd like to thank Phoebe Economopoulos. I'd also like to ask if there are any of you who were involved in the protest earlier on to just keep your questions to the film tonight, but we will be doing everything that we said we would do in terms of handing the tape over to Mr Angelopoulos. I'd just like to introduce a quick clip before we start. This is from Ulysses' Gaze. We'll see you in a few minutes.

[screening of clip from Ulysses' Gaze, followed by entry to stage of Theo Angelopoulos, interpreter Elly Petrides, and Geoff Andrew]

GA: Thank you very much for your patience and for the warm welcome for Mr Angelopoulos. Before we had Landscape in the Mist on this evening, there was a bit of a protest, and I was asked to hand on a tape and some details of the protest to Mr Angelopoulos. To show you I'm a man of my word, I'm doing it.

TA: When I return to Greece, I will do something about this.

[audience applauds loudly]

Time and myth

GA: We just had a look at a clip from Ulysses' Gaze and I chose that particular clip because it's an example of a long sequence shot in which we travel through several time periods, and the main character even changes identity during this sequence, which seemed a very typical moment of Angelopoulos films. I'd like to ask Theo about his treatment of time and his preference for the sequence shot.

TA: I don't know if now is the time for one to talk theoretically. When I began to make The Travelling Players, when I had to come to grips with the history of my country, there was a vast amount of material. I couldn't handle it in a linear fashion - in other words, in a way in which every incident, historically and chronologically, succeeded each other. What is lacking from a historical enumeration, and what I had as a problem with the history books that I read, was that the history, the events, were lost as the story headed for the present. I wanted to create a dialectical relationship with time and with history, that the history of yesterday is not that of the past but of the present. That the yesterday is not something forgotten and left behind in time past, but is present. It defines the present and the history of the present. In this way, a manner of work was born and - without seeming selfish - it's unique in the history of cinema: at the same time, the past, the present, in the same take, in the same shot, without dividing lines, in such a way as to create total confusion between the past and the present. And [to create] this dialogue, this dialectic; to produce, as do all dialectics, a third result, a historical conclusion.

In that period of The Travelling Players, don't forget, we were still under the influence of Brecht, and also under the experience of Marxism. In Marxism there is no past, everything is present. I don't know now, after all these years, what has been preserved of this, because the best part of my hopes, the best part of my dreams, was born in the Left. I remain a lost Leftist. I no longer know what the Left means but I think it's simply the primordial desire of man for a better world. For me that's the Left - [to be] for a world of justice, freedom - and so this relationship between present and past was born. In Ulysses' Gaze I also had to face an additional problem. First of all, a specific problem. The century began with Sarajevo and ended with Sarajevo. What lesson was learned from the first Sarajevo to the second? My question is, do we learn from history? Do we learn from the blood that was shed? Do we learn from all the things that happened? To what extent can we say that we are advancing, progressing? Is the world progressing? Or is it merely technological progress and not a progress of conscience? This was the problem I faced the second time I had to face the problem in Ulysses' Gaze. But in Ulysses' Gaze there is something else. There is the story of the gaze. My question was, do I see? Do I see clearly? Can I still see? After all these things that have happened, after so many images that have entered each other, in a way that they lose their origin and their clarity, do I still see? That was what triggered Ulysses' Gaze.

GA: You've answered about five of my questions already. (laughter) But okay: myth. Ulysses' Gaze, very obviously, is inspired in part by The Odyssey, but in The Travelling Players, there are elements of the story of Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, Electra. Orestes reappears in Landscape in the Mist. Why do you like to use myth in your modern films?

TA: Look, in Greece we are born in an environment where myths are things that we learn from school, in an environment of myths and broken statues. Why didn't you ask me about those broken statues?

GA: I saw a broken statue at the end of O Megalexandros last night.

TA: And there is one more in Landscape in the Mist. And there are others. Look, I'm trying to understand what is - and what it means to me - what we call my origin, my roots. I don't know if I'm a pure Greek. I haven't done any DNA testing. For me, a Greek is someone who speaks Greek. As Heidegger said, our only identity is our mother's language. So my mother spoke Greek, my grandmother spoke Greek and not pure Greek [but] Cretan Greek: a little different, but they carried a history, the language, a development of language, poetry of language. In school we were taught Homer, The Odyssey. I had a problem with The Odyssey. I had a terrible teacher I didn't like at all. He used to talk about 'subject/object', and possibly I was trying to understand what was going on and he was telling me rules of grammar. I hated Homer. When I found myself in Paris a few years later, I had French, French, French. I loved the French but there were too many. I sought escape where I could, and suddenly I returned to Homer, quite by chance I assure you - and suddenly [to] this ancient Greek language, which most Greeks don't understand, because out of pure selfishness I was a good student, I could understand, I could read it. And suddenly I discovered a music - and [I felt] a strange shiver: yes, I come somewhere from there, I'm from there. And it became the text that I loved, the first journey, the first written journey in the history of Europe.

GA: And it's appropriate that you discovered Homer when you were away from home - The Odyssey is about nostalgia for home.

TA: Once I was talking to Tarkovsky in Rome. We lived in the same apartment, the apartment of an Italian friend who was both my assistant and Tarkovsky's. One night we were having dinner. He was making Nostalgia. And I said to him that 'nostalgia' is a Greek word. 'Oh no,' he said, 'it's a Russian word.' 'No, it's a Greek word.' 'No, it's Russian.' I think at that particular point we had a terrible sort of rivalry or conflict because of 'nostalgia', so let's say that 'nostalgia' is neither Greek nor Russian. (laughter)

GA: I think it's Greek... Er, now I've forgotten what I was going to say. (laughter) I was expecting you to continue with why you've used myths in your films.

TA: I'll reply with a myth. I first went to my father's village, which is under the statue of Apollo Epikouros, when I was sixteen years old. I was ill, I hated my father's village and the statue of Apollo. A little later I found myself as a soldier near ancient Olympia and there was a young tour-guide. I fell in love with her. She spoke about Olympia. I was roaming the area where we soldiers were stationed; I had been given an unreasonable punishment, a prison detention because I was late. And then I thought: how could I justify this rather peculiar relationship between Olympia and the statue of Apollo, because somewhere in the middle lay my father's village. And I thought - just like Fellini, who invented his biography - that I was born between Apollo and Olympia, in an erotic meeting between my father and mother. And thus the myth. (applause)

Landscape in the Mist

GA: Now you yourself were born in Athens (laughter) and your family comes from Crete, and yet you make films mainly in the north of Greece where it is very wintry and raining all the time. They are not exactly travelogues. Why is it always winter?

TA: If I had a psychoanalyst, I might be able to answer your question. I don't know, there's an attraction, an immense attraction to the open landscape of Macedonia, the morning mist in the harbour of Thessaloniki, because of the films I loved when I first started watching films. They were the films of Mizoguchi and Antonioni. And perhaps my film course is due mostly to a landscape. You might say I chose it, yes, I chose it. But I think what we do is that we project a landscape that we have inside us. I don't know why, but I know it's the landscape that I find magical, that leaves me the open space in which to dream and to imagine. I have a problem with the sun, and I'm a Mediterranean (man) who has a problem with the sun.

GA: I'm a northerner and I have a problem of not having enough sun! You mentioned Mizoguchi and Antonioni, and there is a very obvious affinity with your work. But I know that when you were young, you also loved westerns and crime films and musicals. And actually I would like to suggest that maybe the musical has affected you a great deal as well, because there is much music and dancing in your films.

TA: That's true. I really did come to love these when I first started watching films. The first film I saw was Angels with Dirty Faces, I think it was 1946 or thereabouts. I was young... and short. All the short and young kids would go to the movies and wait for the grown-ups to pass by so we could squeeze past them and get inside the movie theatre. We would go up to the gallery, various people would chase after us, but we were young - and short - and we could hide. So I saw Angels with Dirty Faces. I remember the lead actor walking. Michael Curtiz was a director who came from Europe, influenced by German Expressionism, therefore the lighting was expressionistic. As the lead actor walked, his shadow was projected huge on a wall, and this man, this gangster, very hard and so forth, suddenly broke and shouted, 'I don't want to die'. I was nine years old. This cry followed me for many nights. I think it was extremely significant for what the cinema was to me.

I loved the police films, film noirs, from Scarface to whatever. But, of course, [also] the films of Minnelli and Stanley Donen and the musicals. I think that you can see that in my films. The scene in Travelling Players where two opposing political factions clash by dancing is a musical. And this happens in many films, Ulysses' Gaze, for instance, the scene of the arrest, of the intrusion in the family. [As] far as the police films, I think you can also see it in certain instances. But I think the way in which one makes a film is [in] how these elements that you take, you can mould them, and because you love them they become part of your personal history. Our intellectual biography, mental biography, is constituted of all these things, and this is the way in which, in the end, we narrate a story. I think that very few people in the history of the cinema have managed to tell a story without anything behind them on a first level. I think that a film like Citizen Kane, with its use of the 18mm lens of those days, which didn't exist before - the depth of field - it's an original way. Perhaps Orson Welles had nothing behind [him].

GA: Actually, I was reminded, as you spoke of Angels with Dirty Faces, of the clip we just showed of Ulysses' Gaze: its crime movie lighting. But you talked about The Travelling Players, and that's perhaps - well, we're playing it here for three weeks, so if you haven't come to see it yet, do come and see it. It's a miraculous film in many way, but perhaps the two most striking things are that you made it under the Colonels and that - I think - you made it without a script. Is that true?

TA: First of all, the whole film wasn't filmed during the time of the Colonels. Half of it was filmed during that time. One of the things I have done in my life was to finish law school. At the university one of my fellow students was a man who later became an under-minister during the Junta. When I wanted to make The Travelling Players I had behind me a previous story, The Days of 36, a previous film of mine which is a film which talks with allusions or insinuations. It talks about dictatorship without naming it, with silences, with insinuations. But at some point these things exploded. In between, what had happened was the rising of the student rebellion at the National Technical University of Athens, and I wanted to speak openly. I wanted to make a film to speak clearly about what was happening, about what I thought was 'the events'. But I had to get a permit. I went to find my old fellow student who was a minister of the Junta. I entered his office and I saw a man, I saw a back. There was a window. He was looking out of the window. I said good morning. The chair turned. 'What do you want?' I had no other choice. I said, 'I want you to approve this script or to get this script through without reading it, and to give the order to the local prefects in the various areas during the Junta to help.' I think there was a silence. Then he pressed a button. A lady came in and he said, 'If you please, sign the permit for this script to be made and an order for the director to be assisted by all the local authorities.' He said to me, 'In the name of our old friendship, goodbye.'

And I made The Travelling Players, [but] not without a problem, because all of a sudden in the streets of Greece, which were under the Junta, there were rebels. I had to shoot a scene like the one he [GA] knows, with songs sung by Rightists and Leftists. And the innkeeper, when he heard the rehearsals and the songs, notified the police. And when I got there in the afternoon to shoot the scene, I found the security police. They asked to watch a rehearsal of the scene. The musician told me, 'We know a lot of songs, we are children of the German occupation. We knew all the Rightist songs and the Leftist songs. We would hear them at night, from here the Left, from here the Right, with the same refrain on both sides.' And we said, 'We are going to sing all the Rightist songs.' He sat at the piano, the orchestra played. Behind stood the security police, dark faces, motionless, waiting. One song, two, three, four, five, six - the agony mounted. We did this until there was one more, and then no more, and then it finished, we ran out [of songs], and I looked back. They had gone. They had thought, 'All of these are okay.'

These were some of the things of the story of The Travelling Players. I remember once [Andrzej] Wajda's scriptwriter - I met him somewhere in Paris, and he told me, 'You know, Wajda and I saw The Travelling Players and Wajda said, "Yes, this film has a new language. It's this, it's that, but it also has a secret."' And what's the secret? I think it does exist in the film: hidden, but it exists. The fact that all those of us who made this film, all the crew and all the actors, did something that at that moment was a form of conspiracy. That was the secret. I can't quite explain it. I felt that I was doing something that had really nothing to do with the cinema. We were making a statement in the name of a nation. It might seem like a big statement, but that's how we all felt. And that emerges, I don't know how, from this material; this strange sense emerges, and even now when I see it, I feel there is something I don't know - one can't quite name it, but it exists.

Eternity and a Day

GA: I think what exists in the film is great passion and your last film, Eternity and a Day, is about somebody who maybe has lost that passion. Now sometimes people say that many of your films are quite autobiographical. I'm not suggesting you've lost your passion for cinema because you keep making these amazingly complex films, but do you share the frustration of the character in that film, of things always being unfinished?

TA: [I prefer the term] deprivation, rather than frustration. First of all, there was the following: I live with a woman who, all this time, plays my shadow. I do that which I can't do otherwise; I have to do it. There's something pushing me that's stronger than I am; that has to do with what... one could say that without it, I can't live, I can't exist. But she... it's no role to play the shadow. It's love, it's a great love, it's the greatest thing that I've had in my life, the most important thing that I've had in my life. How can I say that I walk by and I see only that which I do totally selfishly? -- my own eternity? (applause)

GA: Well... We have some time, so if somebody has some questions please put your hand up.

Q1: Can you talk a bit about the way you use music in your films?

TA: When I first began making films I was furious with [composer Dimitri] Tiomkin. In each film of John Ford's there was Tiomkin. Sometimes I even plugged my ears so that I could watch the shot or scene and not hear Tiomkin. What I discovered was that John Ford's shots are quite slow - not as slow as mine, but quite slow. So I said: no music, no music.

GA: Source music.

TA: Whatever emerges from the scene itself. Somebody sings, somebody plays music. But not a soundtrack. First film, second film,[it was] this way. The Travelling Players was a cunning film - because yes, it did have live music, but a lot of live music. In The Hunters, my next film, there were escapes towards opera. They became justified according to my own perception at the time, because there's Brecht behind [them]. But in O Megalexandros there's music that does not come from there. But what is it? It's Byzantine chants, it's a Byzantine Mass. Okay, I was okay with my conscience. But then I happened to hear Eleni Karaindrou. Why do I like this music? Why can't it be a lyrical comment on what is going on? And here I find Tiomkin again, but gently, sort of hidden. And since then I continue with Mrs Karaindrou, and I have the impression that there is a meeting of identities, an identification. Mrs Karaindrou tells the story of the film in a very lyrical way, without reaching the extremes of a music that fills and dulls, blurs the film. I think it constitutes one of the language instruments of the film that's so identified with the narration, that I personally can't watch my films without this music. It's also strange but this musician only does the music for my films. She does nothing else. I consider this great luck that I met her.

GA: The soundtrack music is available on ECM records. There are quite a few albums if you want to go out and buy them.

Q2: Is it true that in the past you've not allowed your films to be released on video or shown on television? If that is still the case, how difficult is it to maintain that position?

TA: I believe that because I make the films that I make: they need a big screen [but] people keep telling me, 'But we want to see your films'. I think I have found a middle-road solution which is DVD. It maintains the quality of the image. But despite everything, yesterday I received a fax from a Japanese distributor who was about to release all of my films in a big package set of DVDs. He saw Days of 36 for the first time and he said to me, look, I don't feel I'm doing justice to the film and I've decided to release it now - a film made in 1972 - in theatrical distribution and then to make it a DVD. I think that's the best compliment.

GA: People should buy bigger televisions!

Q3: Many of your films are separated into trilogies and one of those trilogies is named 'The Trilogy of Silence' which is made up of, for example, The Beekeeper and Voyage to Cythera. What does silence mean to you, since one could say that dialogue does not play a decisive role in the films?

TA: Look, when one makes plan séquence it's obvious that there are zooms which any director would cut. I allow this time to function, this time which is real time but where silence is not silence, it is a musical pause. And if one were to talk more openly of the way in which American cinema functions to a great extent - we're not talking about the good American cinema, we're talking about the commercial - it doesn't allow any trace of silence. If you want no trace of music, your music isn't only presto, it's largo. Isn't that so?

Q4: During the years of dictatorship, many Greek directors including Mr Angelopoulos created something that's today called the 'Greek Wave', in which directors supported and assisted each other. How did this relationship of the new 'Greek Wave' directors function and did you assist each other in financing your films?

TA: Look, the financial part, of course, is something totally impossible. We don't have the means to assist financially. I was working at that time as a film critic for a Leftist newspaper, and my salary was 1000 drachmas a month. And I also paid for my theatre admission to see films. I taught at film school and I also gave private lessons in film directing. These films were made with very little means but we all wanted to do something to change cinema, and it was a group of us, a whole group. The difference between us was the following: during the dictatorship, many of these people for various reasons, either because they participated in the resistance groups or because they couldn't tolerate the dictatorship, left. They came to England and to France. I stayed behind. And - I think perhaps because I am a persistent person - I made films. When the first film was made by five people - there were just five of us in all - it was with no money, and the second film was made out of sheer coincidence. And yet what I realised later: it's very easy for one to leave. I'm not talking about those who were in the resistance and had to leave. I'm talking about the others who couldn't tolerate it ideologically or aesthetically, but [even] so should have stayed behind to work in this story. Those who stayed behind, [Pantelis] Voulgaris and a few others, they made films, and they still make films. I don't want to talk about anything else, but the dilettantes of politics ended there.

GA: And unfortunately we have to end here. I'm very glad to say that Mr Angelopoulos is still making films: he's in post-production on his latest, and that passion, I am sure, hasn't gone. Do come and see all his movies on the big screen at the NFT during this season. Before we go... well, I said about Theo liking crime movies, and we're going to show you possibly a little bit of a crime movie in Eternity and a Day. So stay in your seats, but first please thank Theo Angelopoulos. (applause)

[Clip from Eternity and a Day]