I was driving down Alexandras in my red XJ quad, one hand in my jacket pocket. I wasn’t driving like that, for the sake of showing off or under the influence of some malformed adolescence, following all, both had long since passed. I was walking slowly and with one hand, because the cold was bitter, as that February was no joke. He had thrown a couple of dustings of snow and once he had even paved it.
The day once morest the angry month grew steadily longer. At the height of the Supreme Court I turned my gaze to the left and the apartment buildings were crowned by an undecided red which at the bottom faded to the yellow of the electric lamps, of the streets perpendicular to the boulevard. From Asclepius to ZINA and certainly before I met the Field of Mars the red of the sky had turned purple and was sinking into the vast expanses of black. Thus is time, as all the sages have taught us, so relative that it can derail every expectation of the day, every belief of the time even every shade from the previously known palettes of certainty. We are tormented by our insecurities, someone wise said by how many of them we can withstand, our strength is also judged.
But isn’t uncertainty that crazy state that pushes us to reach our limits, to explore our possibilities, to find and mark our dead ends and our cliffs? One has to take risks. He must pursue situations that take him out of the familiar, off the beaten track, that unsettle him and make him feel uncertain. That’s the only way there are results and creation, I thought even when I had reached Patision and I was gently turning the engine to enter Ioulianou, only to eat my face, as the front wheel found somewhere. We said risk, but the steering wheel of the machine is better to hold with both hands, I thought and parked outside the “Great School of the Genus of Stavrakos”.
I climbed the ancient round wooden neoclassical staircase, which creaked under my steps, and entered the room where we had class. First of all, the sweetest anarcho-communist I ever met – in all the good, tender and humane sense, he remained in the sense, from the descendants of Proudhon, Marx, Bakunin and others – the chubby angel of Julian and surroundings, Vassilis Raphaelidis. Usually he was waiting for us, but today we were waiting for him and he was actually quite late. At one point he stuck his head out the door and then his body.
– Hey, what are you doing here? In here you will learn cinema, get up and leave, go to the cinemas. Then he burst into his familiar, childish, stifled laugh, which he always extinguished with the movement of bringing his lighted pipe to his mouth, the same laugh which was held back by a tight knot in his tie, this laugh which was crowned by the respect he had earned with his written pains and his verbal ramifications towards fellow travelers friends and ideological “enemies”. Afterwards, we found that all this was not yet another challenge-invitation of the teacher, because he informed us that in Alcyonida, in the then temple of cinema lovers, he said all this decisively and calmly.
– A tribute to Theodoros Angelopoulos starts today, I’m going there, whoever wants to come, he said and started to go down the old wooden staircase, which was now creaking even more under the weight of all of us.
At Alkyonida I heard Vassilis Raphaelides talk regarding the work of the great director entitled “The foggy Greek history in the films of Theodoros Angelopoulos”
“All Angelopoulos’ films might have, if not the same title, at least the same clarifying subtitle: ‘Landscape in the Fog.’ Fog in Greece is not a well-known, common meteorological phenomenon. We are used to the Greek landscape being sunny. And yet the cinematic landscapes in Angelopoulos’ films are hazy, rainy, snowy, icy, wet. Landscapes north, foggy. But, despite their otherwise Greek humidity, Angelopoulos’ films are deeply and essentially Greek: The fog in Greece is not a meteorological phenomenon, it is historical”.
The movie we saw was ‘Representation’, it would have been my third time seeing it. I didn’t have the courage to keep up with the Hunters who were following. On the other hand, Valia, the fellow student, who might possibly take the fatigue of the day off me and entice me to see the Hunters, was hanging out somewhere in front and to the right with some of her friends, without, today, having bothered with me at all . The Representation, Angelopoulos’ first film, captivated everyone in the room, the film is considered a key film for understanding his entire work, the representation of a murder becomes impossible, because between the event and its representation the fog that creates the demonic instinct of self-preservation of two essentially innocent murderers, trying to survive in spite of the murderous landscape, which in essence made the murder. With the misprinted program in my hand, I left the room, stopped in the foyer and glanced at the beginning of the form, hoping that Valia might smell my departure and run following me.
Theodoros Angelopoulos was born in Athens on April 27, 1935. He finished the elementary school of Acharnon Street in Agios Panteleimonas and continued his encyclical studies at the Second Boys’ High School, with classmates well-known personalities of the intellectual life of the country, such as the philosophy professor Christos Giannaras, the journalist and lyricist Lefteris Papadopoulos and the painter Alekos Fasianos. The creator of the emblematic film “The Troupe” (1974), remains the most important filmmaker our country has produced and one of the greatest of world cinema. Dominant themes in his film universe are immigration, the return to the homeland and the Greek history of the 20th century.
Artifices and delays futile, Valia lived in her world, or at best in the slow-moving, labyrinthine world of Theo. I came out of the Alcyone with Valia pulling me back, the frost pushing me forward and the gaze of Homero Antonuti from “Alexander the Great” fixed on my shoulder, mind you not from “Alexander the Great” as always almost panicked pointed out teacher, but from “Alexander the Great”, as wanted by the director and Petros Markaris, his co-screenwriter. Above Antonouti and Markaris, I remembered Thanasis Valtinos, George Arvanitis and Eleni Karaindrou, the valuable collaborators of the great director.
I was going up Iulianou to take my bike, I was not comforted at all by the thought that “Flevaris, even if he gets a vein…” the cold had become very fierce, and it was piercing my bones. The shops from here and there had put up some carnival and well and supposedly, to make a carnival noise, but I had come to the conclusion years ago, “Athenians don’t have it with carnival”, that’s why “Patrinos carnival forever” until the end of fall. I had it on the schedule on Friday, I was going down to Patras for the three days of the climax of the events. As I was going to Patision in the direction of Omonia, I was racking my brain to remember, in which Angelopoulos film we have a scene with something like a carnival. I passed the most colorful, carnival-decorated shops in the center without being able to remember. There at the intersection of the University I always had the dilemma of turning right and from Apostolou Pavlou to go home or turning left to take Stadiou and from Syntagma to be in Koukaki. Until I make the decision, I go back and forth in time, like what the great director did, of course mine was unskilled, wild, but necessary and I left in the future and in an interesting and comprehensive account.
The work of Thodoros Angelopoulos is a series of firsts, Stathis Valoukos underlines them in one of his texts, which I found somewhere on my computer. Representation is the first Greek film that breaks the rules of straight narration. The Days of ’36, which chronicles a political assassination during the Metaxas dictatorship, is the first political film of Greek cinema. Thiasos is the first film in which the space-time unity is broken in the shot sequence. It is also the first film that directly refers to the Civil War and the tragic events of December 44. The Hunters, with its continuous narrative back and forth and space-time deconstruction, is the first fictional film of Greek cinema. Alexander the Great, in turn, is the first essay film on the subject of the leader-people relationship. The Journey to Kythira is the first film that deals with the healing of the wounds of the civil war and national reconciliation.
The Beekeeper, where an epicurean beekeeper travels with his bees from North to South, in a wandering that is a path to death and at the same time a mental landscape, is the first road movie, it is the first film of existential wandering and reflection on life and death. Another wandering, childish this time, is found in his next film The landscape in the fog. Two children wander the hinterland in search of their parents only to discover the violence of adults. The Stork’s Meteoric Step is an elaborate Pirandelian exercise in the problem of identity, the denial of ideologies and borders, and The Gaze of Odysseus, the highest peak. A filmmaker, searching for the beginning of cinema in the lost frames of the Manakia Brothers, travels through the Balkans and experiences the fall of existing socialism and all ideologies.
The first Greek Palme d’Or at Cannes, An eternity and a day, tells the story of the last Sunday of a sick writer who the next day will enter the hospital to die and in his wanderings will end up in the home of his childhood and youth, where he will experience the memory of a bengera and will face eternity looking out the window at the sea, which on this last day of his life seems to be calling him to its wavy embrace. The Weeping Meadow and The Dust of Time, finally, talk regarding the consequences of the defeat of the Left in the Civil War, the exile, the life of the political refugees and the riots in Tashkent with the conflicts, Zacharian and anti-Zacharian, the political amoralism and Stalinism.
I finally took Stadiou, because whenever it was cold and freezing, it seemed to me that the phenomena worsened as I went up past the forest of the Ancient Market and the sacred and unholy hills, while through Filellinon and Amalias everything seemed warmer and more certain. After Karagiorgi, there was also a fog like those that the great creator spread or chased in his films. My body was frozen, I wanted to get home and go somewhere to be quiet, like an overworked beekeeper who had not managed to harvest his day well.
“In The Beekeeper, the mist rises from the mold of rotten dreams, and engulfs everything. Vassilis Raphaelidis said. The beekeeper no longer has a place to stand, and when he reaches the end of his journey he dies, sending a message with his hand through the earth, the only sure and stable point of reference in Greek history. His message is picked up by the kids in the next movie. The children of the Misty Landscape are the children of the beekeeper who died. And now they are looking for him outside the borders of Greece, because Greece is always outside its borders”. Because we too are our journeys, all kinds of journeys, I whispered somewhat persistently, turning off the engine at the corner of Zaharitsa and Drakos, while my teeth chattered to the rhythm of the frost.
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