Angelopoulos and the Time-image

This chapter examines the transition between the ‘politics’ of Theo Angelopoulos' early films and the ‘humanism’ of his later work. Commentators such as David Bordwell and Fredric Jameson have accounted for this change of direction in Angelopoulos' films. Bordwell, for example, notes the shift from a first political phase to one that is more inspired by an existential humanism. Angelopoulos himself declares that after Marxism and Brechtian methods had had their day, he turned to something grounded in humanism and existentialism. The chapter considers Gilles Deleuze's concept of the ‘time-image’ and how it provides a means of distinguishing between two aesthetic modalities by way of their articulations of the past, of time and of memory. It argues that the key distinction is between what Deleuze calls a ‘recollection-image’, and that which he terms ‘pure recollection’. While Angelopoulos' early films are constructed by way of recollection-images, his later films offer pure recollection.