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Greek director Theo Angelopoulos captured eternity at 24 frames per second

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February 05, 2012|By Wesley Morris

Isabelle Renauld in a scene from Eternity and a Day, directed by Theo Angelopoulos. (MERCHANT IVORY FILMS )

Late last month, the great Greek director Theo Angelopoulos was struck by a motorcycle in Piraeus. He was 76 and in the middle of shooting a film. The cause of death carries a degree of irony, insofar as it was the opposite of his art. The accident sounds as if it was quick, violent, and decisive. Almost nothing is quick in Angelopoulos’s films, especially death. In “Eternity and a Day’’ (1998), a poet, played by Bruno Ganz, waits to die, and Angelopoulos waits with him. The camera doesn’t simply watch him or the Albanian child who comes into his life. It watches over them. “Eternity and a Day’’ is not an idle title. It’s a promise.

Angelopoulos is probably best known for “Ulysses’ Gaze,’’ from 1995, because it starred Harvey Keitel - and because it’s mostly great. The film is among the most roving of his cinematic canvases. Keitel is a filmmaker named “A,’’ who, after 35 years, has come home to Greece from America only to begin a trek across the Balkans. His objective is not to make a movie, exactly, but to find the missing films of the brothers Ianachia and Milton Manakis, photographers who also brought cinema to the Balkans. The quest entails tarnished vestiges of the Soviet Empire, a deep but quiet consideration of the collapse of Yugoslavia, excursions back to 1945 and 1946, and several women interested in Keitel.

The movie would be a folly were it not also serious and devoted to matter-of-fact surrealism. (Maia Morgenstern plays each of the women.) But the reason Angelopoulos remained an acquired taste is because his version of the surreal was mysterious in a way that deviated from the storied, imported Europeans - the Bergmans and Fellinis, to name two. Angelopoulos didn’t always seem interested in solving the mysteries he put before us, not even with an actual mystery, as was his ninth movie, 1991’s “The Suspended Step of the Stork,’’ which starred Marcello Mastroianni as a disappeared politician and Jeanne Moreau as his ex-wife.