THEO Angelopoulos sits in the upstairs lounge at the Nicosia Hilton, giving one interview after another, one reporter leaving as the next arrives. He recently did the same thing in London and before that – for 10 days straight – in Korea, all in the context of various festivals showing his latest film, The Weeping Meadow. In Cyprus it’s being shown as part of the European Film Festival, and gets its final screening tomorrow.
He’s the most famous – indeed, the only world-famous – Greek director, now pushing 70 but still uncompromising in his slow yet fluid style. In Greece and Cyprus he’s often the only director people know, along with Steven Spielberg – and usually seen as the anti-Spielberg, hence adored or vilified according to taste.
For some, he’s a poet and master craftsman; for others, his films are akin to watching paint dry. Politics often comes into it: his best-known work, The Travelling Players (1975), filtered 20th-century Greek history through a pointedly left-wing prism. Nowadays, of course, “no-one knows what’s Left and what’s Right. But I remain, sentimentally, a man of the Left – even if that no longer means anything”.
Tenacity and a certain bloody-mindedness are Angelopoulos traits. Like his films, he can be ‘difficult’. He caused a stir at the 1995 Cannes Festival when Ulysses’ Gaze won the runner-up prize and he publicly sulked in his acceptance speech, grumbling that he should’ve won the Golden Palm. He interrupts our interview to put in a call to the Ministry about The Weeping Meadow, which screened the night before: the print was scratched, he complains, and he wants them to arrange a new print to be flown in from Athens for that night’s performance, which is only a few hours away (a courier is dispatched, and the print arrives in time).
He demands the best for his work, as an artist might fuss over the lighting in an art gallery. At one point I suggest that, if he worked on digital video – which is cheaper than film – he might be a lot more prolific (he’s only made 12 films in 36 years). Yes, but the quality isn’t good enough, he demurs; his famous ‘clotted light’ would be flattened and lose its texture on video. After all, if he’s going to make films he himself doesn’t like, “I might as well have become a lawyer”.
He studied Law at the University of Athens, then Film in Paris (French is still his second language; he doesn’t speak English). “I didn’t go into films to make money or ‘have a career’,” he explains. “I did it because I believe it to be a form of self-expression, just like writing”. For a while he was tempted to soften his style, do something ‘easier’; “once you overcome that temptation, though – which happens quite early on – you can hold on till the end. And at least you have the satisfaction of carrying on what you started, whatever the cost”.
The “cost”, in his case, has been critical acclaim and public indifference, verging on hostility. Perhaps in response – or out of disillusionment with the Great Hope of socialism – he turned to more ‘human’, less overtly political films in the mid 80s. He’s quick to point out that Weeping Meadow, part of a projected trilogy set against the backdrop of modern Greek history, isn’t a retread of The Travelling Players but in fact “the story of a woman… The main character is human suffering”. He admits his older work dealt in specifically Greek themes, but “a grieving woman is the same everywhere”. Yet the mass audience still hasn’t warmed to his long takes and real-time rhythms – and he’s happy to accept they never will.
After all, “What is a shot? It’s a sentence, like in literature. There are writers who work in long sentences – Proust, Faulkner – and others who are curt, like Hemingway. In literature, all these styles are acceptable. In film, because there’s money involved, things have to be commercial”.
But, he adds, literary writers didn’t write for the mass audience – and nor can a filmmaker descend to what Joe Multiplex likes and doesn’t like. “I don’t speak for the audience,” he says, with some exasperation. “The mass audience will never be able to understand certain things”.
What he cares about is Time, especially “intermediate time” – the time it takes to move from A to B, to reach a destination. He always shows this in his films – unlike the usual “cinematic time”, where you cut from place to place. Isn’t it dead time, though? “There is no ‘dead time’. There are pauses, like in music”.
Yet time is also his greatest enemy, standing between him and the audience. “There’s less and less time in people’s lives,” admits Angelopoulos, and it feeds into everything – the films people watch, the music they like. We’ve even abolished ‘intermediate time’ in our daily lives, filling it with mobile phones and laptops. In today’s world, does he ever feel a bit…? “Like a stranger,” he confirms instantly.
Love or hate the films, but it’s hard to hate this dry, courteous little man, with his bald pate and academic air – the soft, precise way of speaking, the conversation dotted with references to Aristotle and Hecabe, the way he leans back in his chair and takes off his glasses to wipe them in a lull between interviews. In a world of flash he seems to stand for austere contemplation and the need for taking time, giving everything its due. His friend, Italian writer Tonino Guerra, has a telling (if possibly apocryphal) story about him:
“I look at Theo smoking his cigarette, and the ash is getting longer and longer, ready to drop off. He drinks his coffee slowly, so-o-o slowly. And I ask him: ‘How in God’s name can you drink your coffee so slowly?’ Because, you know, Italians like to down their coffee in one.
“And he answers: ‘You drink coffee, Tonino. But I taste it…’.”
l The Weeping Meadow. 9pm tomorrow night at the Cine Studio in Nicosia and 8.30pm December 2 at the former Othellos cinema in Larnaca as part of the Friends of the Cinema Society’s European Film Festival. The festival itself runs until mid December
