Theo(doros) Angelopoulos died in January 2012 depriving us of one of the greatest contemporary voices in cinema. In the last 20 years no other director except for Abbas Kiarostami, Michael Haneke, Bela Tarr and Hou Hsiao Hsien has been quite so uncompromising both in his approach to cinema and to the demands he makes on audiences. He leaves a legacy of 13 incredibly rewarding feature films which we are very lucky to have in 3 cheap box sets coming from Artificial Eye. Volume 1 is comprised of his first 4 features, The Reconstruction, Days of '36, The Travelling Players and The Hunters. For the uninitiated Angelopoulos's cinema can seem formidable. His subject (especially in these films) is 20th century Greek history and politics, about which audiences are assumed to know in detail. He also assumes audiences have a thorough knowledge of Greek antiquity, especially Homer's Odyssey, Aeschylus's The Oresteia and the Sophocles Oedipus cycle. His films are autobiographical to an extent and it helps to know that Angelopoulos was born in 1935 a year before the onset of the Metaxas dictatorship, that he grew up through World War II with bombs falling around him, that his sister Voula died early at the age of 11, that his father disappeared in Red December 1944 only to reappear suddenly 5 years later when all his family had assumed him dead, that he is a left-wing socialist (just like his father), and that he studied law and worked for the socialist film magazine Demokratiki Allaghi before turning film-maker. All these things find their way into his films in various guises as re-occuring tropes. His directing style is famously ellusive. He rejects traditional notions of narrative story telling and character psychology, adopting instead Brechtian alienation which distances us from his stories and protagonists. He deliberately uses narrative ellipses, forcing audiences to work hard to interact with his films by withholding simple information. His mise-en-scene is worked out very carefully with his ever-present cameraman Giorgos Arvanitis in which close-ups are ignored in favor of long shots and in which takes tend to be lengthy, slow and incredibly detailed affairs lasting upwards of 5 minutes each. These takes often skip time periods and involve complex tracking shots across meticulously arranged landscapes. He invented this 'sequence shot' technique and in The Travelling Players it reaches perfection.
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