Inroduction

The history of modern Greece is essential for understanding Theo Angelopoulos’ cinema in both its aesthetic and political dimensions. Born in 1935, Angelopoulos had lived through the traumatic histories in Greece. During the civil war, his family was divided into two sides of Communists and anti-Communists, and his father Spyros was imprisoned and condemned to death by the ELAS, only escaped by luck till the end of the war. When Angelopoulos was nine, his mother took him to “a room full of corpses” to search for his father’s body. These traumatic memories remain his filmic inspiration. We see the return of the father in the first scene of his debut Reconstruction. And later, the searching of father becomes a recurring theme in the trilogy of silence.

The history of modern Greece is essential for understanding Theo Angelopoulos’ cinema in both its aesthetic and political dimensions.

Ng Chi Ning: Posted on Facebook and IG on Mar 28, 2022

Highlights

Coincidentally, according to Rollet, the first memories of Angelopoulos as a film spectator also date back to the civil war. The film was Michael Curtiz’s Angels with Dirty Faces, and Angelopoulos only remembers one scene.

When the hero is to be executed, he disappears off-screen. But his shadow remains in the frame as the echo of the hero’s cry, ‘I don’t want to die!’ resonates. ‘Cinema entered my life,’ writes Angelopoulos, ‘as a shadow projected on a wall and a cry.’ (qtd. in Rollet 229)

Highlights

For Angelopoulos then, the power of cinema comes from the off-screen presence of a death, which lingers in a suspended time as a shadow and a cry. This is a cinematic time which evokes one’s deepest traumatic memory.

Highlights

As a celebrated auteur of world cinema, Angelopoulos consistently made films which stands out in the Greek film industry, for they strategically incorporate the international art house film language to represent the national trauma. In this regard, I posit that the trilogy of silence is an auteurist project which contemplates, remembers, and archives the Greek traumatic histories through cinematic slowness, thereby opening up a reading of Angelopoulos’ cinema.

Experience at MALCS

The MALCS programme offers comprehensive and essential courses for anyone who are interested in cultural studies and film studies. I am grateful for everything I’ve learnt from the professional teaching staffs and the fellow classmates.