Voyage to Cinema: Studies of the Work of Theo Angelopoulos

Framegrabs from Ταξίδι στα Κύθηρα/Voyage to Cythera ( Theodoros Angelopoulos, 1984)

The world needs cinema now more than ever. [Theo Angelopoulos, cited by Andrew Horton]

Realism? Me? I’ve not a damn thing to do with it. The religious attitude to reality has never concerned me. [Theo Angelopoulos, cited by Raymond Durgnat in “The Long Take in Voyage to Cythera: Brecht and Marx vs. Bazin and God.” Film Comment 26.6 (November/December, 1990): 43-46]

[Some] complain that Angelopoulos’ films are long, slow and boring, but that is exactly what they are not. They are too short (for the subject matters they cover [...]), quite fast (within the image or sound or the narrative, there is always something occurring) and always fascinating (in the multi-layered way they mix the personal with the political, the aesthetic surface with the deeper meaning, etc.). [Bill Mousoulis, "Angelopoulos’ Gaze', Senses of Cinema, Issue 9, 2000]

What is important, what has meaning, is the journey... [and] journeys are through history as well as through a landscape. [Theo Angelopoulos, quoted in Andrew Horton, The Films of Theo Angelopoulos: A Cinema of Contemplation, 1997: 98]

Today, Film Studies For Free solemnly pays tribute to the monumental cinematic career of Greek director Theo Angelopoulos, who very sadly died last week while near the set of his film The Other Sea.

David Hudson has collected a wonderful series of links to items of interest to anyone who has been touched by or is studying Angelopoulos's films. Below, as is its memorialising wont, FSFF points its readers in the online direction of a whole host of high quality academic studies of his work, including a number of freely-accessible, book-length items.

• Acquarello, 'Theodoros Angelopoulos', Senses of Cinema, Issue 27, 2003
• Maria Chalkou, Towards the creation of 'quality' Greek national cinema in the 1960s, PhD Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2008
• Hsin-Ning Chang, Viewing the Long Take in Post-World War II Films: A Cognitive Approach, MA Thesis,  Ohio University, 2008 
• Burcu Fikretoglu, 'Gazing at Decay in the Narratives of Theo Angelopoulos and W.G. Sebald', Academia.edu [date unknown]
• Andrew Horton, 'The Greek and Balkan Spirit of Comedy During the Journeys with the Films of Theo Angelopoulos', GreeceTravel.com, [date unknown]
• Smaro Kamboureli, 'Memory under Siege: Archive Fever in Theo Angelopoulos’ Ulysses’ Gaze', Paper at Performing Identity/Crossing Borders: The Cyprus Symposium: Cicac, 2007
• Angelos Koutsourakis, 'The Desire for History in Lars von Trier’s Europa and Theo Angelopoulos’ The Suspended Step of the Stork' , Kinema, Spring 2010
• Antonis Liakos, 'Historical Time and National Space in Modern Greece', Slavic Euroasian Studies, Hokkaido University “Regions in Central and Eastern Europe: Past and Present”, Sapporo, Japan, December 14-16, 2005
• Vangelis Makriyannakis, 'Angelopoulos’ Ulysses' Gaze: Where the Old meets the New', Forum, Issue 1 - Origins and Originality, Autumn 2005
• Evangelos Makrygiannakis, Films of Theo Angelopoulos: a voyage in time, PhD Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2009
• Bill Mousoulis, "Angelopoulos’ Gaze', Senses of Cinema, Issue 9, 2000
• Arthur J. Pomeroy, 'The sense of epiphany in Theo Angelopoulos’ Ulysses’ Gaze', Classical Receptions Journal Vol 3. Iss. 2 (2011) pp. 213–226
• Anne Rutherford, 'Precarious Boundaries: Affect, Mise en scène and the Senses in Angelopoulos’ Balkans Epic', Senses of Cinema, Issue 31, 2004
• Irini Stathi, Eleftherios Tsouris, Nikos Soulakellis, 'Geography as Utopia. From the Rigas Pheraios Map to the Division and Establishment of Borders in the Balkans: An Intercultural Itinerary through the Geography of Ulysses's Gaze', Earth Conference, University of the Aegean, 2008
• Gonda A.H. van Steen, 'Playing by the Censors' Rules? Classical Drama Revived under the Greek Junta (1967-1974)', Journal of the Hellenic Diaspora, 27.1-2 (2001)
• Lasse Thomassen, 'Heterogeneity, Representation and Justice: Borders and Communities in Angelopoulos’s Balkan Trilogy', originally in D. Morgan and G. Banham (eds), Cosmopolitics and the Emergence of a Future (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), 191-210 
• Paris Tsekouras, 'Narrative and historical accuracy in The Travelling Players', Academia.edu [date unknown]
• Katerina Zacharia, '"Reel" Hellenisms: Perceptions of Greece In Greek Cinema, in K. Zacharia (ed.), Hellenisms: Cutlure, Identity, and Ethnicity from Antiquity to Modernity (Ashgate 2008)