The Cinematic Language of Theo Angelopoulos by Vrasidas Karalis

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Cinematic Language of Theo Angelopoulos by Vrasidas Karalis Eleftheria Rania Kosmidou (bio) Vrasidas Karalis, The Cinematic Language of Theo Angelopoulos. New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2021. Pp. x + 207. 24 illustrations. Cloth $135.00. Vrasidas Karalis’s monograph The Cinematic Language of Theo Angelopoulos, published by Berghahn in 2021, is an important addition to the scholarly study of Greek film. Firstly, it investigates Theo Angelopoulos’s work in terms of the filmmaker’s biographical context, largely avoiding the established Brechtian methodological framework for discussing his films. Secondly, despite an abundance of journal articles, only a few books exist in the English language that deal with the work of Angelopoulos. Since Andrew Horton’s seminal books The Films of Theo Angelopoulos: A Cinema of Contemplation (1997a) and The Last Modernist: Theo Angelopoulos (1997b), David Bordwell’s Figures Traced in Light: On Cinematic Staging (2005), and Irini Stathi’s edited collection Theo Angelopoulos (2000), Karalis’s monograph is the first serious effort to reopen and recreate a space for academic discourse on Theo Angelopoulos’s cinema internationally. Within the field of film studies, much attention has been given to Angelopoulos’s distinct cinematic language, and the wider Greek and international literature is rife with studies analyzing and exploring his Brechtian cinema. In The Cinematic Language of Theo Angelopoulos, however, Karalis discusses the filmmaker’s work differently. Using mainly philosophical but also art-critical discourse analysis and occasionally Freudian terminology, he situates Angelopoulos’s work within biographical and sociopolitical contexts as he explores the ways in which the filmmaker experimented with his work throughout his life, constantly inventing and reinventing himself as a global auteur consciously attempting to create a global cinematic language. Karalis argues that the dominant mode of reading Angelopoulos’s films through a Brechtian lens is misleading and has restricted the study of his films. While acknowledging Brechtian elements in Angelopoulos’s early films, he sees a change toward Aristotelian catharsis and empathy after 1977. Moreover, after Alexander the Great (Megalexandros, 1980), Angelopoulos completely abandoned his epic mode to adapt a “fluid visual lyricism” (42). Karalis attributes these changes to Angelopoulos’s political, existential, and personal meditation, his self-questioning and self-redefining. As Karalis sets out to examine the continual evolution of Angelopoulos’s approach to his films, one of his first tasks is to present the reader with a brief chronological overview of the filmmaker’s life and work—including his collaboration with his longtime friend Vasilis Rafailidis when they co-founded the [End Page 484] journal Contemporary Cinema (Synchronos Kinimatografos) in 1969—together with details of his films’ production and reception. Karalis provides evidence of Angelopoulos’s director of photography (DoP) Giorgos Arvanitis’s contribution to his cinematic universe, crediting Arvanitis for introducing an anti-illusionist style of minimalistic filming. Situating Angelopoulos and Arvanitis’s images within the category of the Deleuzian “planes of immanence,” non-referential images that exist within themselves and in themselves (Deleuze 2001), Karalis contends that their collaboration created an emotional cinema because of the Deleuzian completeness and singularization of their visual images. This is what differentiates Angelopoulos’s earlier films from the later films in which he worked with DoP Andreas Sinanos, a collaboration that resulted in a lyrical and fluid cinema. Karalis also attributes some of the changes he discerns in Angelopoulos’s work to Eleni Karaindrou’s post-1984 musical contribution to Angelopoulos’s cinema: her scores are non-diegetic and her emotional melodies rectify Angelopoulos’s narratives, the distanced performances in his films, and their overall visual style. Karalis recognizes four stages in Angelopoulos’s work, which he eloquently calls a polyptych, borrowing a term from painting and art history. Referring to the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard’s ethical and religious teleological stages of human life (Kierkegaard 1992), he argues that Angelopoulos seems to have gone through these stages in a reverse order: from knowledge and strong political ideology to doubt, from doubt to introspection, from introspection to redemption through aesthetics, eventually (in his last films) reaching nihilism and emotionalism. Abandoning Brecht and the Brechtian acting mode in 1977, Angelopoulos became more interested in poetry in his quest for what Karalis calls “the cinematic sublime” (148). His...