An ‘Untimely’ History

This chapter examines a formal dialectic as it plays out through Theo Angelopoulos' later films, arguing that here the historical stage is treated as a psychic scene. Angelopoulos' work is not modernist cinema in the sense that Anglo-Saxon critics have given to this term to qualify, in art history, a time past, but still belonging to modernity. Angelopoulos' films are, in fact, traversed by history. His gaze upon Greece allows him to embrace the upheaval that altered the face of Europe throughout the twentieth century. Focusing on films such as Voyage to Cythera, The Odyssey, The Travelling Players, and Ulysses' Gaze, the chapter considers what it calls a ‘poetics of form’ and how Angelopoulos' obsessive return to the same themes and the constant repetition of a small number of malleable figures in his work emerge ‘through the images, the sounds, and the narrative’.