Syncope and Fractal Liminality: Theo Angelopoulos’ Voyage to Cythera and the Question of Borders

This chapter analyses Theo Angelopoulos' 1984 film Voyage to Cythera , arguing that it ‘constitutes a creative hinge in Angelopoulos' career’, whereby an individuating and ultimately humanising ‘recalibration of creative effort applied as much to the characters in his films as it did to himself, as the director of the films' characters’. Employing Voyage to Cythera as a starting point, the chapter explores two interrelated concepts and two interlocking mental functions — syncope and fractal liminality. It considers how Voyage to Cythera condenses within its intricate filmic texture Angelopoulos' key paradigm of the ‘boundary phenomenon’. It shows that Angelopoulos' borders can be more accurately represented as ‘fractal liminalities’ — endlessly self-duplicating, transitional lines of separation between parts of an organic entity, or between stages of an ongoing journey, which cannot be located and drawn with any degree of certainty.