Honorary Graduates
Orations and responses
Response by Theo Angelopoulos
I would like to thank the University of Essex for this honour. By
honouring a film director, the University honours Cinema.
My relationship with Cinema began almost as a nightmare. It was in ‘46
or ‘47, I don’t quite recall. The post-war years, a time when a lot of
people were going to the movies and we, the kids, sneaked in among the jostling
adults standing in line at the box office, in order to disappear in the magic
darkness of the balcony. I saw many movies then, but the first one was a
Michael Curtiz film ‘Angels With Dirty Faces’.
There’s a scene in the film where the hero is led to the electric chair by
two guards. As they walk, their shadows grow larger and larger against the
wall. Suddenly, a cry…”I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die”.
For a long time afterwards this cry haunted my nights. Cinema entered my
life with a shadow that grew larger on a wall and a cry.
I began to write at a very early age, at the same time, overwhelmed by the
tumult and the emotion that the turbulence of previous history had created in
me. The sirens of war in 1940.
The German army of occupation entering a deserted Athens. First sounds,
first images. Then the Civil War of ‘44. The slaughter. My
father condemned to death. My mother’s hand trembling in mine as we
searched for his body among dozens of others, in a field. A long time
later a message from him, from afar. His return on a rainy day. The
first stories. The first contact with words, words in search of an image.
I didn’t know then. I understood quite some time later when I wrote the
words in my first script. The words were “it’s raining”.
In my days, Homer and the ancient tragic poets constituted part of the school
curriculum. The ancient myths inhabit us and we inhabit them. We
live in a land full of memories, ancient stones and broken statues. All
contemporary Greek art bears the mark of this coexistence.
It would be impossible for the path I have followed, the course I have taken,
for my thinking not to have been infused by all of this. As the poet says,
“they emerged from the dream, as I entered the dream. So our lives were
joined together and it will be very difficult to part them again.”
From very early on, my relationship with literature and poetry brought me
close to all the investigations, whether language or aesthetics, of modernism.
Later, in the beginning of the sixties, in Paris, in the days of political
activism, Brecht’s epic theatre which refuted, up to a point, Aristotle’s
definition of dramatic art, was becoming a point of reference.
It was years before I went back to Aristotle and his definition of tragedy:
“Tragedy is an imitation of a worthy or illustrious and perfect action…” It was
years before I discovered that Molly’s monologue in the last chapter of James
Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ is nothing but a distant echo of the astonishing description
of Achilles’ arms from Homer’s ‘Iliad’.
‘Reconstruction’, my first film, was born in the period of dictatorship of
the Colonels as an attempt to piece together the truth out of its fragments.
Reconstruction not as a goal, but as a journey. The little stories as they
are reflected but also determined by the greater History.
The father is symbol, presence and absence, as a metaphorical concept as well
as a point of reference. The journey, borders, exile. Human fate.
The eternal return. Themes that pursued me and still pursue me. All
my obsessions enter and exit my films, as the instruments of an orchestra enter
and exit, as they fall silent only to re-emerge later. We are condemned to
function with our obsessions. We make but one film, we write but one book.
Variations and fugues on the same theme.
Many of those who have done me the honour of concerning themselves with my
work think that my manner of writing is the result of political choice.
That’s not quite how it is. Of course, while I was shooting ‘Days of ‘36’,
a film about dictatorship during a time of dictatorship, it was impossible to
use direct references I sought a secret language. The allusions of
History. The ‘dead time’ of a conspiracy. Suppression. Elliptical
speech an aesthetic principle. A film in which all the important things
appear to take place off camera. But my choice of long takes does not stem
from this fact.
Working with long takes was not a logical decision. I have always thought it
was a natural choice. A need to incorporate natural time and space, as
unity of space and time. A need for the so-called ‘dead time’ between
action and the expectation of action, which is usually eliminated by the
editor’s scissors, to function musically, like pauses. A concept of the
shot as a living cell which inhales, delivers the main word and exhales. A
fascinating and dangerous choice which continues to the present day.
I have been working with the same team of collaborators since the time I
began. They know me and I know them. With the years they have become my
family. They often make me angry when we work, I miss them when I don’t
see them. I feel uncertain when a new technician joins the team, as though
everything depends on this new person. I talk to them about my plans and
my uncertainties. So many years have gone by and still the same agitation,
the same uncertainty, the same need for us to be close, holding our breath, and
waiting for the end of the shot.
Voyages, partings, wanderings. A car, a photographer friend driving in
silence and the road.
Very often I think that my only home, the only place where I feel a sense of
equilibrium, a peace of mind, is sitting next to my friend who’s driving.
The open window, the landscape flitting past.
Images are born during these journeys. I don’t have to keep notes.
They are born with their silhouettes, with their colours, with their style, very
often with their camera movements as well, with their aesthetic balances, with
their light. The hundreds of photographs serve as memory. But
nothing ends before the film is shot. During the shooting of the film
everything is recreated on the basis of this new reality. Actors,
unforeseen events, fortunate or unfortunate, sudden ideas.
And yet the beginning has preceded it. Long before. From the time when
out of nothing, the idea for the film is born. Almost thirty years have
gone by since my first film. I could paraphrase TS Eliot and say:
"So here I am, in the middle way.
My years largely wasted amid the rages of History,
still trying to learn to use images.
And my every attempt is a wholly new start and a kind of failure because we
only learn when we no longer have to express ourselves.
And so each new venture is a new beginning in the general mess of imprecision
of feeling. Undisciplined squads of emotion.
A raid on the inarticulate.
To recover what has been lost, and found, and lost again.
To recover…
In my end is my beginning."