Days of ’36 (Meres tou ’36) Greece, 1972 A political assassination kicks off Theo Angelopoulos’ portrait of one Greek dictatorship made under the shadow of another. This opening act of violence triggers a series of more ambiguous but equally ominous machinations—a prison escape, a hostage crisis, foreign powers conspiring over cocktails—with Angelopoulos emphasizing the atmosphere...
Voyage to Cythera (Taxidi sta Kithira) Greece, 1984 After years living in exile in the Soviet Union, a communist resistance fighter, Spyros (Manos Katrakis), returns home to the dismay of his family and neighbors. His son Alexandros (Giulio Brogi) is a filmmaker casting a movie set during the German occupation while the villagers of his...
The Suspended Step of the Stork (To Meteoro Vima tou Pelargou) Greece, 1991 The plight of refugees in the Balkans and internationally dominated much of Theo Angelopoulos’ attention in the 1990s, leading to two of his most acclaimed films, Ulysses' Gaze (1995) and Eternity and a Day (1998). The Suspended Step of the Stork, which...
Alexander the Great (O Megalexandros) Greece, 1980 Theo Angelopoulos insisted that Alexander the Great was his “most simple film” to date for its linear structure, beginning on New Year’s Eve 1900 and proceeding from there. The film’s straightforward chronology, however, belies the complex interplay of Greek Orthodox and Byzantine liturgy, music, and ritual that Angelopoulos...
The Hunters (I Kynighi) Greece, 1977 When a hunting party finds the body of a communist partisan perfectly preserved in the snow, they carry it back to their lakeside lodge to open a formal inquest. Representatives of the conservative elite—politicians, military officers, businessmen, media figures—who have gathered to celebrate New Year’s Eve 1977, they are...
The Weeping Meadow (To Livadi pou Dakryzei) Greece, 2004 A family history told in wide shot, The Weeping Meadow spans the turbulent decades between 1919 and the end of the Greek Civil War in 1949 as they buffet the lives of Eleni (Alexandra Aidini) and her adoptive brother and lover Alexis (Nikos Poursanidis). Taken in...
This panel brings together distinguished scholars of Greek cinema to discuss the Greek director's enduring contributions to a global cinema of time, history, and social crisis. Our speakers will discuss various aspects of Angelopoulos’s contemporaneity, from the global impact of his distinctive filmic style and the philosophical dimensions of his visual language to the cinematic...
The Dust of Time Greece/Italy/Germany/Russia, 2008 In a direct reference to Ulysses’ Gaze, The Dust of Time follows a filmmaker named A (here played by Willem Dafoe) on a journey to make a film about his parents. Moving between past and present, memory and history, fiction and reality, the film spans the second half of...
The Broadcast (Ekpompi) Greece, 1968 In the manner of Jean Rouch’s Chronique d'un été (1961), the producers of a pop music television show hit the streets to ask women what makes the ideal man. A sharp satire on consumerism and escapism after the military junta known as the Regime of the Colonels seized power the...
Ulysses' Gaze (To Vlemma tou Odissea) Greece, 1995 Theo Angelopoulos once confessed to an interviewer, “I would like to believe the world will be saved by the cinema.” Ulysses’ Gaze gives this hope form as a Greek filmmaker known as A (Harvey Keitel) becomes obsessed with finding lost reels of film shot by the Manaki...
The Travelling Players (O Thiassos) Greece, 1975 A powerful vision of postwar Greek history as experienced by a troupe of actors on perennial tour, The Travelling Players swept the awards at the 1975 Thessaloniki Film Festival and announced Theo Angelopoulos as a major international auteur. A multi-generational ensemble, the players drag themselves and their trunks...
An Evening with Tassos Boulmetis and “1968” Saturday, October 28, 2023 7:30 p.m. Billy Wilder Theater, UCLA Hammer Museum 10899 Wilshire Blvd Los Angeles, CA 90024 United States + Google Map Presented by the UCLA Film & Television Archive and Gefyra 7:30pm – Film Screening Q&A with: Tassos Boulmetis (Director) Paul Malcolm (Senior Public Programmer, UCLA Film & Television...