Post by RNL on Jan 10, 2009 16:42:50 GMT
What did you not love about the Angelopoulos film?
Firstly I think his visual style is unsuited to evoking literal remembrances, in the sense in which we cut from the present reality into the subject's remembered past, as opposed to his alternative technique of dramatising remembrances more ambiguously in sort of blended tenses, segueing into dreams within a sequence shot. It's his adherance to the sequence shot aesthetic that makes it feel awkward; its persistence and objectivity don't evoke a sense of memory, especially when not granted any stylistic contrast with reality.
But aside from finding the visual style at odds with the conventionalities of the narrative form, I had a problem with the theme. At times the film oozes self-pity. The natural death of an elderly bourgeois intellectual is not a tragedy, and to treat it as such, especially when you're backgrounding it with actual tragedy (say, the visit to the Albanian village, which provides by far the film's most amazing image), it can actually be irritating and even offensive to listen to the character lament having lived his life in exile and having never been able to love.
Angelopoulos's self-diagnosis as a "lost Leftist" seems unfortunately appropriate in light of this film. I'm looking forward to watching his earlier work. I mean, was there a point at which his characters became surrogates for himself, and begin to express his disorientation? That seems to be the case in the three films he made in the '90s. I'm remembering the image of the statue of Lenin in Ulysses' Gaze and its obvious connotations.