There are very heavy rains and — moments later, not even hours — the ground is dry again. Across the river (there is a river behind my house) somebody plays loud country and western, the reverb all but destroying the sound. Birds, wheeling this way and that; and now the clouds break into tufts that seem like balls of very blatant cotton wool. It feels strange to admit that autumn has come home, that it is removing its coat in the lobby, is dripping rain water onto the tiles, while I sit here — chewing, blinking — and say not very much to it. But it’s a season for watching films I guess. I also — at this time — find a kind of electric desire to be inside fogged up backstreet pubs. The stuffing in the seats blown out, the light failing. Oh yes and later, tonight, at the BFI, I’ll be watching the 4k restoration of Lynch’s Lost Highway, so you can expect something on that very soon.
— The past for sale — the low, hulking silhouettes of container ships (grey; like blocks of clay) on the horizon, and only blank whiteness beyond them. “I don’t like funerals”. Pale, yellow terminal — modern, and faded — on whose wall is a blown-up photograph of the ruins of the acropolis. The days lengthen, the past recedes — persists.
— Young man seated on motorbike. Two children join him (both are searching for their father — a pointless, meandering quest to an imagined ‘Germany’, which doesn’t exist). Thessaloniki? Dust of snow on ground. Dull, aching sea. If this is the land of Odysseus, and this his journey, then his lyre is broken. Now, hand — that of a statue — is raised from the water.
— Is it accusatory? Its index finger has fallen away – an accusation without accusation. It is lifted with its wires – a miraculous act sublimated to the brute tools of levers and wire and machinery. Just as there is no subject, there is no centre — just as there is no destination. “Where are you going?” North. Germany, why Germany? Orestis claims that he is only a snail, slithering toward nothingness. His name is derived from mountainous. Not also the doomed madness of Orestes? A corruption of it. Fittingly.
— Flickering, as if the frame rate was too slow — a black aura flooding the edge of the screen. That it floats — impossible stone, polystyrene (sham, confected). Just like the blown-up decal of the acropolis. Broken edifice; nothing behind it.
— Theo Angelopoulos. His travelling players are old and seedy. One paints lipstick, close to the camera, on her lips. Their stadium is a wracked, muddy field, and they can’t find a venue to host them. The shambolic tragedy of culture — of received tradition, the epic/mythopoeic mode — when forced to subsist in such an emptied-out world. Two children search for their father and meet really only indifference or violence or ignorance. If the young man is their friend, then he’s in no place to really help them. Their father is a figment, just as Germany is a figment. This bites differently after 2008, when these ports and bus terminals and motorways (almost always empty) have been sucked up by the hoover of post-crash German capital. So, Angelopoulos is really the oracle of Delphi — speaking unconscionable truths back in 1988. They made sense back then, only differently. I actually think about Barnett Newman’s argument (1948) on the embarrassment of the past (of classicism) – its futility, how it disables things, how we “do not need the obsolete props of an outmoded and antiquated legend”. And yet, they persist. Chokingly. Ruins, debris. They clog the fields — an archaeology of persistently ironic wounds. The landscapes through which they cross become like a graveyard into which energy is poured, and in which the past climbs out and dies there, again.
— Reality notwithstanding. How it wobbles, declines. The two children leave a police station and, standing outside, it begins to snow. The figures around them stand without movement, their faces cast at the sky. Nouveau statuary. Other bodies, other streets — all fixed in place (you can spot a tiny shudder of movement, here and there). To these children, the adult world is a confounding and inexpressible mass. Crossing a street (night has fallen) a cart drags a horse, and the horse is left in the slush. It is dying — a sublime and terrifying moment. Revellers spill from a nearby bar. There are several worlds, several realities, jostling against each other, but they are not attempting to change lanes. The horse dies — there are tears, and a fading toward silence.
— Long takes. Takes that don’t so much writhe as expand (like foam, they don’t destroy things but fill the gaps of your perception). Horse dying in street, boy crying. Rape that happens in the back of lorry. Cars pull up to the lay-by and then continue. Single images protrude from the dull, dun surface of his films (hand suspended above water; dying horse; empty motorway lit by lamps). His is really a political cinema, so much as it confronts the drifting and crises of post-1974 Greece. The limp-limbed persistence of the classical past (inert, pointless); the evacuated infrastructure of machinery and motorways and building sites. Frequently, his characters are going places without going places. They saunter and wobble. We have one foot in reality (very acutely so) and one in a dream. The dream isn’t very pleasant, but it’s not sufficiently shocking to wake us. There is a sort of inertia suspended over the nation. It is like soup. Nobody can really move around in it, but they try. Where is Germany? North. It doesn’t exist!
— Angelopoulos’ death was almost photographed. I think it was Ilias Bourgiotis who took the photo. Drapetsona (the place). The filmmaker was crossing a road to direct trucks (for the film he was then shooting, The Other Sea), and he was hit as he returned from across the road. This was 2012. He died several days later. I don’t want to presume to extract any significance of this except for the tragedy of his death.
— His characters are always coming and going. Wide shots allow much of the land to be drunk-in. Hills and valleys fold this way and that. His figures often stand, starkly, against them, the camera tracking around. They are lost against their landscape just as they are part of it. Statuary. It may seem to swallow them.
— This is the edge — the beginning — of my Angelopoulos drift. I’ve seen very little, and yet I can’t determine why I’ve missed so much. This is exactly what I like. Hinterlands, pointless derives, winter-locked ports, the subcutaneous sickness of national and existential unease/disease. There are other places, elsewheres. There is passage – sometimes for its own sake (drifting like a “snail”), sometimes for work, survival, Etc. Landscape in the Mist finishes up in a place that is neither here nor there. The tree that Orestis had invited the children to find in a reel of film that he’d found, just lying there on the floor. In those cells, there was no tree. Just fog. Lorry Gottheim energy. Their (the children’s) arrival at the place of the tree is not Germany. They may have crossed a border, drifted into a new terrain. There is fog and darkness – an occluded lens. Gunshot rings out, they embrace the tree. Death. Voyages that are memories; memories that are voyages. I think of Nabokov’s Glory (1932), a novel written by him (in Russian) while exiled in Paris. Martin Edelweiss makes a disastrous return to his homeland, almost disappearing; actually disappearing; really disappearing (disfiguring) away from the substrate of the text, and in this way becoming the text. “The path that disappeared into the woods”. There are ghostly fingerings of Angelopoulos. “Martin, in a breathless trance, imagined how, completely alone [...] he would roam at night along unfamiliar streets […] cabs splashing through the fog”. Crossing into his real-unreal homeland (like a painting; a text), he crosses from legibility into a space of very latent obscurity. Not death, quite. Like the children of Landscape in the Mist, they have crossed elsewhere. Not quite death. Germany – we already know — does not exist, even while its being the object of their drift(ing), it becomes more real than anything else.
— Many things are missing (tree in film celluloid; father; statue’s finger, Etc). Few things are recovered or found. There is no auditorium for the players. They hawk their costumes on the edge of the dock.
— Final image — not that of the film, but of this piece. The children disembark a train. Police are walking along the train, probably checking passports. It doesn’t matter. They disembark the train. Here, walking through a landscape of construction-destruction, they stand before the huge, gaunt frame of a piece of mining equipment — a massive, articulated monster (so it seems) which suddenly screams into life, its gears winding and its alarm blaring. There are machineries of obliteration whose reality (their dumb bluntness — a tool) renders them really as sublime fictions. The machinery is a monster. It blocks their path as if this was a fantasy, a piece of folklore – a myth. For Angelopoulos, myth persists. It is a massif of pistons and claws that tears into their earth, and that has no heart — and no eyes.
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