Jonathan Romney
THE word “epic” has been rather devalued in cinema ever since they revved up the chariots in the original silent Ben-Hur. This week, however, epic cinema returns to its classical roots, with the release of Ulysses’ Gaze, the latest film by Greek director Theo Angelopoulos. Over three hours, Harvey Keitel’s modern Homeric hero wanders through the most forbidding backwaters of the Balkans in search of his own Golden Fleece, three reels of film from the dawn of cinema.
Ulysses’ Gaze is that anachronistic thing, a sombre European art film that takes cinema, and high culture, deadly seriously. Angelopoulos has something of the air of a high priest officiating over a boringly solemn ritual.
He doesn’t give an interview so much as throw abstractions, in telegraphic French, rarely giving a straight answer where a quote from Borges or an allusion to Welles’s camera style will do. Sidelined by the mainstream, Angelopoulos is proud of his status as one of European cinema’s last great patriarchs, a good friend of Antonioni, Bergman and Kurosawa, who also counts Wenders and Oshima among his fans.
In Ulysses’ Gaze, Angelopoulos transposes the Bosnian conflict into a too vaporous mythical context. Why did he want to recreate an Odyssey for the Balkans today?
“Because it’s the exemplary voyage, the first great written journey of the West,” Angelopoulos says. “I wanted to move from the pre-history of the myth to the present.”
Ulysses’ Gaze is as much about cinema as about history, and unashamedly uses the figure of director as hero – an existential archetype that Angelopoulos has great faith in. “It’s the question of the look, which is the director’s tool. We don’t see the world the way you do, we see it through the lens. The first time you put your eye to the camera, you discover the cinema and the world, but in different ways.”
At Cannes last year, Ulysses’ Gaze was pipped to the Palme d’Or by Emir Kusturica’s Underground, which offered a buffoonish but more specific take on Bosnia. The two films have nothing in common, Angelopoulos insists. “His film is about Yugoslavia, mine is about the Balkans. My theme is the encounter between a film-maker’s look from the start of the century and from the end. I don’t claim to speak for the Balkans, just about things that I have seen. My voyage was an interior one.”
Anyone expecting a big Keitel performance will be disappointed. He’s more like a monolith in Ulysses’ Gaze, imposing and stranded in mid-landscape. Angelopoulos feels the partnership was a success, despite an initial culture clash. “I distrusted him at first, because he knew nothing. You’d talk about something that everyone in Europe knows, and he’d never heard of it. That annoyed me,” he says, with a touch of patrician disdain. But, he adds approvingly, “certain actors are famous for their silences, and there are too few silences in the cinema”.
His films from the Seventies on have been ceremonial, stylised dramas of modern Greek history. He has often cultivated risk or hardship – he defied censorship by embarking on The Travelling Players (1975) while the colonels’ regime was still in power, and Alexander the Great (1980) was made during winter in Greece.
Angelopoulos’s unusually stately road movies are not easy rides, but at times justify their rigours. After watching Ulysses’ Gaze, you feel you’ve travelled to places you never knew existed, certainly not in travel-brochure Greece.
“People don’t say `a Greek film’ any more, they say `an Angelopoulos film’,” he says. “People find my films a unique experience. For me, that’s much more important than spending an agreeable two hours in the cinema.” So he thinks.