Cinema Notes| Persistence of Vision: The Cinema of Theodoros Angelopoulos

From original article: https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/persistence-of-vision-the-cinema-of-theodoros-angelopoulos

...catalog of persistent themes, tonal frequencies, plot points, and, perhaps most indelibly, sheer visual boldness.

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His cinema is punctuated by a remarkable succession of single images that linger long after the film has concluded, often retaining in the viewer’s consciousness more than an overall story or specific characters.

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At times these images stand alone, resonating purely for their immaculate compositional beauty; other times, the imagery will be at its most effective when absorbed within the context of the narrative.

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the silent cross-river wedding ceremony in The Suspended Step of the Stork (1991), a visually evocative sequence, a significant moment of barriers failing against the tenacity of undiluted romance, and a powerful act of communal border defiance

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Angelopoulos is widely praised for his lengthy tracking shots, slow pans, and plunging crane maneuvers, all executed in masterful strokes of directorial orchestration.

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Within cramped interiors, his camera likewise snakes along walls and mingles among the room’s dwellers like a stealthy unseen observer. The wandering movements mirror the characters as they too roam through their surroundings with a subtly coordinated momentum. Juxtaposed with this mobility, however, is a pronounced stillness, sections of Angelopoulos’ films where progress is stunted by a protracted pause in narrative and physical motion. With this tendency to linger on action (or inaction) long past the norm, sometimes for a frankly perplexing duration, Angelopoulos crafts remarkably painterly still frame configurations.

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And with few close-ups, the emotive resonance of his characters is largely conveyed in this extended stagnation and in the framing of their revealing posture. He will oftentimes deny the viewer a conventional degree of empathy, choosing to instead heighten the mood through a complex visual arrangement.

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Even extremely powerful scenes find Angelopoulos at an unrelenting observational distance. Take, for example, the devastating “field of honor” in The Weeping Meadow, with bodies of fallen soldiers strewn across the ground while grieving black-clad female figures shriek with haunting sorrow, all as the camera hovers above and from afar.

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Angelopoulos’ extraordinary use of location is similarly defined by the wide shot. His tracking camera surveys towns and landscapes as an unfolding scroll. Though his films are frequently in urban settings, usually bleak and dilapidated, he is at his aesthetic best when characters are amongst austere undeveloped settings. These rustic exteriors are swamped in a soggy, shrouded, misty grayness, giving the initial sense that something imperceptible is out there; pouring rain and fog can render characters barely visible, while solitary figures (at most joined by a loved one) are dwarfed by, and enveloped in, the scenery.

Where is the poet

What was that tattoo that I once thought I'd have? Nothing but poetry. The most important thing is to find poetry, to realize poetry.

Where is my own?

Mine is where sorrow lies, where quietness just starts to break, where a laugh ricochets a room, a face lit, eyes sparkled, in the beginning, and in the end, more about the end, right before the end, right after the end, long after the end, the end in foresight, the end in hindsight.

A lot about the end. The end defines the beginning. The end gives meaning to the beginning.

In essence, my poetry is probably steeped in melancholy.

And that's alright.

In defense of the poor image

"The poor image is a rag or a rip; an AVI or a JPEG, a lumpen proletarian in the class society of appearances, ranked and valued according to its resolution. The poor image has been uploaded, downloaded, shared, reformatted, and reedited. It transforms quality into accessibility, exhibition value into cult value, films into clips, contemplation into distraction. The image is liberated from the vaults of cinemas and archives and thrust into digital uncertainty, at the expense of its own substance. The poor image tends towards abstraction: it is a visual idea in its very becoming."

"The poor image is an illicit fifth-generation bastard of an original image. Its genealogy is dubious. Its filenames are deliberately misspelled. It often defies patrimony, national culture, or indeed copyright. It is passed on as a lure, a decoy, an index, or as a reminder of its former visual self. It mocks the promises of digital technology."

https://www.e-flux.com/journal/10/61362/in-defense-of-the-poor-image/