Theo Angelopoulos: " A voyage in history, time and space "

Abstract

This paper aims to analyse the historical and dialectical approach of Angelopoulos's mise-en-scene as well as it's connection to historical events in his films: Day's of '36 (1972), The Travelling Players (1975), The Hunters (1977), Alexander the Great (1980). Angelopoulos was particularly interested in the Greek History of the twentieth century, and he puts it under examination, because of the events that took place in the Greek nation during and after the WWII and the Greek Civil War (1946-1949). The visualization of the history by the point of view of the defeated, gives him an opportunity to develop his narratives and style and put the story into a new language: melancholy, a materialist poetics with a Marxist taste, which follows the lives of those who lost or have been lost in the turns of the historical events. This first period of Angelopoulos coincides with the most turbulent political and historical years after the WWII: the dictatorship (1967-1974) of the colonels. The director makes the dictatorship an advantage, in order to represent history from a critical point of view with a dialectic approach, making a reference to the current situation through a kind of political theatrical scene he creates in his films, which could include different places and different times, using forms and techniques of the well known Bertolt Brecht's " epic theatre ". Without flashbacks he navigates into the historical events that appears in front to the audience as present.