Generative Apogee and Elegiac Expansion: European Film Modernism from Antonioni to Angelopoulos

This chapter situates Theo Angelopoulos within the compositional context of European post-war cinematic modernism, and more specifically in relation to fellow filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni. Antonioni's early 1960s cinema has long been recognised as one of the key influences on Angelopoulos' filmmaking. Angelopoulos himself has described Antonioni's L'avventura (1960) as a seminal moment in his development, reportedly watching it thirteen times while a student in Paris during the early 1960s. The chapter examines the complex development of European modernist cinema in the postwar period through the work of Angelopoulos and Antonioni. The chapter shows that Angelopoulos' films present time and history in the form of a co-present or multi-layered textuality. It also considers reflexivity, composition and the gaze in the films of Angelopoulos and Antonioni before concluding with a discussion of Angelopoulos' films in relation to modernity.