Where to begin with Theo Angelopoulos

2025 marks both the 90th anniversary of the birth of Theo Angelopoulos (1935 to 2012) and the 50th anniversary of the premiere of The Travelling Players (1975), the film that firmly established him in the front rank of great European filmmakers, a master of cinema to rank alongside Michelangelo Antonioni, Miklós Jancsó and Andrei Tarkovsky, and for very similar reasons. 

All four possessed a peerless eye for landscape and architecture, as well as an ability to construct the most densely packed and yet instantly graspable images, which can be read both as objective reality and historical / philosophical / spiritual metaphor. Like the others, Angelopoulos also possessed an absolute certainty about where his films were heading – typically to a perfectly conceived, often tantalisingly open ending. In short, style and content are in perfect harmony.

Virtually all of Angelopoulos’s films are duly set in his native Greece (and exceptions like 1995’s Ulysses’ Gaze are still based in south-eastern Europe), and each drinks deeply at the wellspring of his country’s 20th-century and ancient histories, its culture and especially its unusually rich mythology. Parallels between his film’s narratives and the stories of Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, Elektra, Odysseus, Orestes, Penelope and Telemachus are invariably fully intentional.

But if that makes them sound dauntingly inaccessible, nothing could be further from the truth: they’re certainly long, slow, conceptually and philosophically challenging, but also so formally dazzling that many of his greatest set-pieces can be appreciated even without subtitles.

Sadly, Angelopoulos hasn’t been as well served as either his peers or successors such as Béla Tarr and Nuri Bilge Ceylan. Although all of his features have been released on DVD in the UK, they’re long out of print, they haven’t been upgraded to Blu-ray, and cinema outings are few and far between. This is why the ICA’s complete retrospective is so welcome – not least because the big screen, in the company of a similarly enraptured audience, is where these films really belong.

Angelopoulos’s third feature ranks alongside Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950), Andrzej Wajda’s Kanal (1956) and Jancsó’s The Round-Up (1965) in that it wasn’t merely deemed an instant classic from the night of its September 1975 premiere, but also championed as a defining exemplar of an entire national cinema, a status it retains today. Internationally, pre-Angelopoulos Greek cinema tended towards the populist likes of Never on Sunday (1960) and Zorba the Greek (1964), whereas The Travelling Players’ 230-minute length heralded something quite different.

Spanning 1939 to 1952, it’s about a troupe of itinerant actors traversing northern Greece to perform Spyridon Perisiadis’s locally well-known Romeo and Juliet-style 1893 tragedy Golfo the Shepherdess. The players try to focus on their art, but they can’t help but be directly – sometimes fatally – affected by one of the most turbulent of all periods of Greek history, taking in the fascist-adjacent Metaxas government, attempted Italian invasion, successful Nazi occupation, liberation, a long civil war, and an uneasy peace on the threshold of Greece joining NATO. Indeed, the film went into production when Greece was under military dictatorship, necessitating euphemism and symbolism (and pretending that they were shooting a different type of film) in lieu of direct political comment.

This film fully unveiled Angelopoulos’s mature style. There are reputedly just 80 shots, typically long, sinuous, intricately choreographed (360º pans abound), lasting several minutes, and sometimes ending in a different historical era to that in which the shot commenced. (Virtuoso cinematographer Giorgios Arvanitis filmed the vast majority of Angelopoulos’s output.)

Having acclimatised yourself, you can pick pretty much anything else as a follow-up, although the heart-clutchingly powerful Landscape in the Mist (1988) makes a good next step if only because the travelling players make a repeat appearance. In most other respects, it’s sharply different. This time the protagonists are children (although this is emphatically not a kids’ film): 11-year-old Voula and five-year-old Alexandros, who run away from their mother and assorted Greek authorities in search of a father who may not exist.

That was the third film in his ‘Trilogy of Silence’, the others being Voyage to Cythera (1984) and The Beekeeper (1986). The former is more typical of Angelopoulos, being about an elderly man who returns to Greece after a three-decade-plus exile in the Soviet Union, only to find that he no longer recognises the country, and indeed vice versa. This film introduced two more of Angelopoulos’s regular creative partners, co-writer Tonino Guerra (who’d already worked with Michelangelo Antonioni, Andrei Tarkovsky, Federico Fellini, Elio Petri and the Taviani brothers) and composer Eleni Karaindrou.

His ‘Border Trilogy’ (or ‘Balkan Trilogy’) was directly torn from then-current headlines. The Suspended Step of the Stork (1991) is about the early 1990s refugee crisis, with a reporter investigating the disappearance of a once prominent politician (Marcello Mastroianni), who keeps getting spotted huddling among the immigrants – although his wife (Jeanne Moreau) denies that it’s him. The near-three-hour Ulysses’ Gaze (1995) casts Harvey Keitel as a long-exiled filmmaker returning to his native south-east Europe to track down undeveloped reels of film from the dawn of Greek cinema, though he finds that accessing Sarajevo is no small challenge at the time of the war in the former Yugoslavia (indeed, Angelopoulos himself was unable to film there for safety reasons). And 1998’s Palme d’Or-winning Eternity and a Day (ironically, one of Angelopoulos’s shorter films) is about a terminally ill writer (Bruno Ganz) who takes it upon himself to rescue an Albanian orphan from ruthless traffickers.

However, many devotees assert that he never improved on his first decade. Reconstruction (1970), his only black-and-white feature, was a formidably confident debut, ‘Tarkovskian’ before Tarkovsky himself became associated with long shots of people trudging through rain-saturated landscapes. Meanwhile, The Hunters (1977) sometimes nudges Luis Buñuel in its absurdist deconstruction of the group freak-out that occurs after a group of bourgeois hunters discovers the corpse of a 1949 Communist fighter that’s still bleeding fresh blood nearly three decades on. And Alexander the Great (1980) casts Taviani regular Omero Antonutti in the title role, though he’s far more often seen in distant long shot than close-up, and says virtually nothing throughout the 210-minute running time. He’s a blank canvas on which his early 20th century acolytes end up projecting anything that suits them as they try to create an independent utopia. As a ruthlessly clear-eyed anatomisation of a personality cult, this has plenty of ongoing resonance today.

More recently, there was what was announced from the outset as a trilogy that would collectively span much of the 20th century, although in the event Angelopoulos was killed in a road accident on 24 January 2012 while filming the planned final part The Other Sea. But the two completed films, The Weeping Meadow (2004) and The Dust of Time (2008) offer a by now familiar blend of human drama offset by the weight of history and mythology.

There’s no such thing as a bad Angelopoulos film, but Days of ’36 (1972) might not be an ideal first port of call, relying as it does on advance knowledge of the historical events of 1936 (the abrupt transition from democracy to dictatorship) – although the obliqueness was a matter of necessity, as the film was both produced and released under the 1967 to 1974 military dictatorship. While Angelopoulos’s mature style can be discerned in embryonic form, it’s still in thrall to Hungarian master Miklós Jancsó, just as Janscó’s own second feature Cantata (1963) was imitation Antonioni.  

Of the later films, The Beekeeper owes its comparatively high profile to Marcello Mastroianni’s involvement, but while he’s marvellously hangdog as an existentially depressed teacher who takes early retirement to cross the Greek countryside with his beehives in tow, it feels more generically ‘Euro-arthouse’ than Angelopoulos’s films usually do.

A Moving Image of Eternity: The Cinema of Theo Angelopoulos runs at the ICA in October and November.