Angelopoulos’ Gaze: Modernism, History, Cinematic Ethics

This chapter examines how, in Ulysses' Gaze, Theo Angelopoulos strives to combine history, myth, and politics in ways that constitute a cinema of historical experience, collective memory, and ethics. Angelopoulos' films have been praised for their historical ambition, political themes and explorations of memory, as well as for their commitment to cinematic modernism. For some critics, like David Bordwell, Angelopoulos is a late modernist auteur whose ‘anachronistic’ cinematic style bears the hallmarks of 1960s and 1970s ‘political modernism’. For others, like Fredric Jameson, Angelopoulos' work is best understood as hybrid or transitional. The chapter considers how Angelopoulos' aesthetic style expresses historical experience and cultural memory and argues that Angelopoulos' methods as a filmmaker are paradigmatically modernist.