Memory Under Siege: Archive Fever in Theo Angelopoulos’ Ulysses’ Gaze

This chapter examines the idea of recollection by focusing on Theo Angelopoulos' 1995 film Ulysses' Gaze, arguing that cultural memory creates virtual spaces in which ‘different temporalities’ are brought together and ‘experienced simultaneously’. Drawing on Jacques Derrida's concept of ‘archive fever’, it considers this aspect of cultural memory in Ulysses' Gaze and shows that the film compulsively returns to its historical antecedents, but in doing so it confronts the countervailing logic: that ‘the archive never fully yields its secrets’. Through the aesthetic tropes and complex ideological vision that have become the trademarks of Angelopoulos' cinematography, Ulysses' Gaze dramatises not only that the history embodied in cultural archives must be heard in the plural but also that the imperative to remember and who — as well as how one — remembers must be seen as the result of complex discursive forces.