c h apter 1

Theo Angelopoulos as Film Critic

Maria Chalkou

M ost of the prominent filmmakers of New Greek Cinema – a politicised,

auterist and art-oriented trend which dominated the Greek filmscape
of the 1970s and 1980s – started their careers as assistant directors and film
practitioners in the studios of the Greek commercial film industry of the 1950s
and 1960s. Theo Angelopoulos, one of New Greek Cinema’s leading direc-
tors, followed, however, a different path and entered the field professionally as
a film intellectual. After studying filmmaking in Paris, he returned to Athens
and, from 1964 to 1967, worked as a film critic for the newspaper ∆ημοκρατική
Αλλαγή (Democratic Change), while between 1969 and 1971 he contributed
occasionally to the journal Σύγχρονος Κινηματογράφος (Contemporary Cinema).
The time frame of Angelopoulos’ critical activity is particularly intriguing
since the 1960s were the formative years of New Greek Cinema. It was also
a period of political upheaval and instability in Greece, of exceptional vitality
in the arts and, in terms of production and attendance, unparalleled growth of
the domestic film culture. This chapter focuses on the most intensive period of
Angelopoulos’ critical writing – his criticism for Democratic Change – during
the turbulent but creative pre-dictatorship 1960s. It attempts to throw light
upon unknown aspects of his cinéphile background; to trace critical attitudes,
emerging ideas, early tastes and unexplored influences; and to consider how his
criticism relates to his eventual ideas on cinema and filmmaking practices.

democratic change a n d a n ge l opo ul os ’

cri t ica l s ty l e
Democratic Change, the evening newspaper of the left-wing party EDA,1 was
founded in February 1964, after the liberal Ένωση Κέντρου (Centre Union
Party) came to power, and it was closed down by the military Junta in April
24 m a r ia c halkou

1967. In the 1960s, cultural life was hugely significant to the Greek Left as it was
a vehicle for resisting the political establishment and promoting oppositional
ideas. In line with Lenin’s statement about cinema being the most important of
the arts and acknowledging film’s enlightening potential, the Greek Left was
decidedly open to film culture in general (Rafailidis 1966: 124–8). Like other
leftist newspapers and journals of the time (such as Επιθεώρηση Τέχνης [Art
Review]), Democratic Change gave preference to cinema, and created a promi-
nent space for writing on film.
One of the most compelling elements of film criticism in Democratic Change
was that it attracted a group of young, leftist, militant and mostly first-time
writers who were soon to become leading figures of New Greek Cinema either
as filmmakers or critics. They included the film director Fotos Lambrinos
(February 1964–August 1964); the major female figure of New Greek Cinema,
Tonia Marketaki (March 1964–September 1965); the cinematographer Alexis
Grivas who, under the pseudonym Fotis Alexiou, corresponded from Paris
(November 1964–August 1966); and from September 1965 to April 1967,
the most emblematic and influential critic of New Greek Cinema, Vassilis
Rafailidis.2 Angelopoulos first joined on 8 December 1964 and contributed
regularly until the closure of Democratic Change. He served exclusively as a
film reviewer and was the paper’s most enduring film critic, although also the
most laconic. He kept a relatively low profile, never covering film festivals
or writing informative or opinion pieces and he played a secondary role to
Marketaki and later Rafailidis who functioned as the dominant critical voices.
The film section of Democratic Change was impressively rich and showed
that its content and practice were influenced by contemporary French film
journals such as Cahiers du Cinéma (notably Marketaki, Angelopoulos and
Grivas had studied or were still studying in Paris and all the critics experi-
mented with filmmaking).3 It comprised tributes to and interviews with
exceptional filmmakers and actors (including interviews with Carl Theodor
Dreyer, Agnès Varda and Masaki Kobayashi as well as tributes ranging from
Robert Aldrich to Luis Buñuel), international film festival coverage (such as
Cannes, Venice, Karlovy Vary and Moscow), translated articles (for example,
by Georges Sadoul), best film listings and weekly film reviews. Attention was
also given to domestic film and the annual Week of Greek Cinema, state poli-
cies and censorship issues, film societies and seminars, alongside new move-
ments and Eastern European cinemas. Led by the critics, Democratic Change
also played an active role in instigating debates on Greek cinema4 and holding
events such as the First Athens’ Greek Cinema Week (24–30 October 1966).
In almost two and a half years, Angelopoulos wrote 221 mostly short
reviews, which were representative of the wide spectrum of films on offer at
the time in Greece (Chalkou 2008: 64–86). The huge majority were about
European films (French, Italian, British, German, Nordic, Spanish, Eastern
 the o ange lopo u los as f ilm cr itic 25

European and co-productions), around sixty concerned American movies,

a handful were on Japanese cinema and only a few covered domestic films.
Characteristic of his critical texts was his purely cinéphilic and surprisingly
apolitical perspective. His writing was not didactic and he did not discuss the
films in ideological, moral or political terms (dominant practices among his
fellow critics) but only made occasional and brief comments on socio-political
issues and with little relation to Marxist ideas. While Angelopoulos’ criticism
revealed a loose intellectual engagement with the Left, it nonetheless con-
firmed a passionate commitment to cinema. His overall approach resembled
Truffaut’s statement when leaving the editorial team of the then highly politi-
cised Cahiers: ‘We spoke of films only from the angle of their relative beauty’
(cited in Turim 2002: 398).
Apart from a significantly different point of view, he also brought to the
newspaper a refreshingly playful style of writing, often characterised by an
elliptical presentation of the storyline, witty and humorous remarks, and at
times poetic language. Occasionally he eschewed plot summaries entirely,
either discussing the motifs and traditions of a genre, or contemplating rather
than describing a film’s story. His writing was rich in background informa-
tion on film history, literature and theatre, with references to music, painting,
and comics and comparative discussions of the films. Furthermore, revealing
his professional training as a filmmaker with a directorial eye, he was the first
from the newspaper’s critics to use technical cinematic vocabulary, employing
French terminology, such as ‘travelling’ (tracking shot), cadrage (framing),
decoupage, sequence, raccord (link), and so on, which were later broadly
adopted by film criticism in Greece.

an g e lo pou l o s ’ pa s s i o n f o r gen r e fi l ms
To those who are familiar with Angelopoulos’ interviews, it is not surprising
that he had a taste for popular and genre cinema, and specifically for crime
films and film noirs, thrillers, adventures, comedies, westerns and musicals.
He reviewed a huge number of popular movies, both American and European,
often treating cinema as a matter of genuine visual pleasure and entertainment.
While his colleague Rafailidis drew a clear demarcation between quality and
commercial cinema and encouraged the audience to watch ‘difficult’ and ‘dis-
quieting’ films, emphasising that cinema is not escapism (DC 20 June 1966)5,
Angelopoulos, by contrast, did not hesitate to recommend films in terms of
pure enjoyment and visual spectacle, often concluding his pieces with the
statement ‘the two most enjoyable hours of the week’ (DC 16 March 1965).
In this respect he enjoyed action scenes (fighting [DC 8 December 1964] judo
and karate displays [DC 29 December 1964]), which he found ‘enthralling’
26 m a r ia c halkou

(DC 23 February 1966), for him the politically charged battles between whites
and Indians were ‘always visually full of flavour’ (DC 11 October 1966), he
was a fan of Eddie Constantine (DC 16 February 1965), and he even recom-
mended The Masque of the Red Death (1964) as an ideal film of its genre (DC
12 October 1965).
Perhaps one of the most striking issues in the context of a leftist newspaper
was Angelopoulos’ infatuation with James Bond films. In contrast to Rafailidis
who spoke of ‘the shame of James-Bond-ism’ and saw in Bond the symbol of
‘the modern superman who hardly distances himself from the Nazi ideals’(DC
28 July 1966), for Angelopoulos Bond was ‘elegant, irresistible, cynical, and
necessary’(DC 21 December 1965). He gave an assertive review of Thunderball
(1965) and repeatedly returned to the subject when discussing spy films and
adventures, which he saw as imitative, praising the original. What attracted
Angelopoulos about Bond was ‘the balanced architecture of the story’, ‘the use
of the setting as an aesthetic event’ (DC 23 March 1965), ‘the elegant irony of
Sean Connery, the humour of the dialogues, the realism of the effects’, ‘Ian
Fleming’s orgy of fantasy’ (DC 24 February 1965). As far as Thunderball was
concerned, the ‘purely spectacular aspect’ was of ‘important interest’, ‘photo-
graphic compositions [were] more tenacious’ and underwater scenes, where
‘plasticity is combined with narrative harmoniously’, were most beautiful.
And although he observed a hint of flaccidity, ‘this did not mean that the film
is viewed without pleasure and without succeeding in offering almost the same
thing with the previous ones: an adventurous narrative, a “popular” hero, a
cocktail of colours full of flavour, two enjoyable hours, regardless of suspect
views’ (DC 21 December 1965).
In his interviews Angelopoulos spoke of his fascination with detective
stories, both novels and films, which stemmed from his childhood and
adolescence (Fainaru [1999] 2001:125) and was reflected in his work. His
first lost short film, for example, was a ‘nod to film noir’ (Horton 1997: 20),
Αναπαράσταση (Reconstruction, 1970) is a crime story and Μέρες του ’36
(Days of ’36, 1972) allude to gangster movies (Gregor [1973] 2001: 15). In
Democratic Change he reviewed many crime-related movies and displayed
a thorough knowledge of the relevant genres and literature. He praised
American B-movies (DC 15 February 1967) and singled out ‘the unparalleled
period of American crime 1941–8 that historians call “golden” and the nos-
talgics call “unique”’ (DC 12 October 1965) for having ‘a taste for complaint
and criticism, which occasionally has led to a sort of modern tragedy with
unexpected symbolical implications’ (DC 4 January 1966). He considered
the best features of American noir to be its narrative departure from complex
social reality, surprising authenticity, narrative density, formal austerity,
‘asthmatic pace’ (DC 2 October 1965), ‘spoken word reduced to the absolutely
necessary for the development of the narrative’, emphasis on sound and the
 the o ange lopo u los as f ilm cr itic 27

realistic treatment of décor (DC 4 January 1966). He also paid attention to

contemporary crime (he gave an extensive and assertive review of The Killers
[1964] as a sincere adaptation of Hemingway’s fictional world [DC 3 January
1965] and particularly liked French film noir, which he saw as drawing from
the American tradition (DC 12 October 1965). He was enthusiastic about Le
deuxième soufflé (Second Breath, 1966) by Jean-Pierre Melville, finding excep-
tional density, plasticity and pictorial beauty in its narrative and deeming it
one of the most important crime films ever made (DC 24 January 1967).
Angelopoulos considered the Western to be a genre in decline. He
thought its thematic core – ‘the ballad of the lonely man’ with ‘ambiguous
origins,  [. . .] a suitcase in his hand, a few cigars and a pistol’ (DC 22
January 1964) – had been ‘consumed long ago’ (DC 11 October 1966). His
disappointment in the genre is expressed most eloquently when discussing
Nevada Smith (1966), in his remark that ‘Hollywood is ageing badly’ (DC
15 November 1966). ‘Convention is always lurking at the edge of the story’
destroying any attempted progress. Hollywood needs a radical overhaul
although its current circumstances make that impossible (DC 11 October
1966). Similarly, although he was sometimes nostalgic for Ford (DC 25
January 1967), he gave Cheyenne Autumn (1964) a negative review as a film
of loose tension that missed its targets (DC 16 February 1965). He was dis-
dainful of Spaghetti Westerns as imitative (DC 18 January 1966), although
he thought that the ‘competent craftsman’ Sergio Leone had achieved
something new: ‘transposing James Bond to a Western’ (DC 4 February
1967). In his view, ‘tired elitists’ were attracted by the new genre but ‘the
cinema-opium has closed its cycle’ and it is time, for regaining lost ground,
to get rid of hopeless experiments such as ‘Italian Westerns’ (DC 10 January
1967). What seemed to escape his contempt was The Appaloosa (1966) for
being influenced by modernist cinema and renewing some of the expressive
manners of the genre (DC 17 January 1967) or The Professionals (1966), for its
thematic potential and the nostalgic presence of the aged but still attractive
protagonists (DC 14 February 1967).
Angelopoulos also displayed considerable knowledge of cinematic and
theatrical comedy and was particularly fond of burlesque, visual gags, Jerry
Lewis (‘the spark of madness that permeates the best tradition of burlesque,
driven to the extremes by Lewis, produces euphoria’ (DC 23 March 1965),
and Frank Tashlin (one of the rare representatives of American comedy
‘deserving’ of “classical” burlesque’ [DC 11 October 1966]). Angelopoulos
considered The Nutty Professor (1963), directed by Lewis, a real success
and in his review of The Disorderly Orderly (1964), which he found weaker
than previous collaborations between Lewis and Tashlin, he questioned
the necessity of Tashlin’s presence (DC 23 March 1965). Later, however,
he emphasised his absence (DC 26 October 1965) and mourned the ‘fall’
28 m a r ia c halkou

of Lewis: ‘In  times when the tradition of burlesque vanishes from the
American cinema, the talent of Lewis is eulogy. Do we have to believe that
this last spring has run dry?’ (DC 25 October 1966) Yet Tashlin’s comedies
were noticed by  Angelopoulos irrespective of Lewis. He believed that The
Glass Bottom  Boat (1966) includes  some of the best moments of Tashlin’s
career, while the gags ‘amassed in a manner reminiscent of the golden era
of American comedy  result in unconstrained redemptive laughter’ (DC 11
October 1966). He also paid attention to Vincente Minnelli (who although
self-imitative ‘treats comedy as a ballet’ [DC 22 December 1964]), Billy
Wilder (who ‘is renewing our belief in his talent’ with Kiss Me, Stupid (DC
16 March 1965) and William Wyler (whose How to Steal a Million [1966]
was ‘transfixed by irony’ [DC 13 December 1966]). He also made interesting
remarks about European comedies: that Italian comedy was simultaneously
ethography (DC 7 March 1967) or that modern European comedy, which was
characterised by realism (DC 28 February 1967), had distanced itself from
burlesque with gags based on triviality and everydayness rather than exag-
geration (DC 26 April 1966).
Angelopoulos’ fascination with musicals, evident also in films such as
Ο Θίασος (The Travelling Players, 1975) and Οι Κυνηγοί (The Hunters, 1977),
has been widely discussed (Horton 1997: 86). Yet as it becomes apparent
from his critical output (he actually reviewed very few musicals), his inter-
est was not merely in the genre but in the use of music in cinema in general.
He was mesmerised by Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) ‘the first attempt at
a cinema-opera’ and produced a poetically written piece about the film,
which managed not to estrange viewers with the use of singing actors (DC
16 February 1965). He exhibited a wide knowledge of classical and modern
music and occasionally used musical terms to describe films, for example
Cousteau’s Le Monde du silence (The Silent World, 1956) was a minuetto (DC
29 December 1964) or Campanile’s Una Vergine per il Principe (A Maiden
for a Prince, 1966) was a divertimento (DC 15 March 1966). He also praised
the use of Bach by Bergman in Såsom i en spegel (Through a Glass Darkly,
1961) for ‘making evident the cinematic properties of the emotionally uncon-
sumed pre-classical music’ (DC 11 January 1966). Furthermore, while he
was working for Democratic Change, Angelopoulos was preparing an eventu-
ally abandoned film about a contemporary Greek rock music band named
Forminx, with the intention of ‘do[ing] something in the spirit of Richard
Lester’s films with the Beatles’ (Fainaru [1999] 2001: 133). In his celebratory
account of The Knack . . . and How to Get It (1965) by Lester he referred to
the Beatles’ film A Hard Day’s Night (1964) to explain that spirit and perhaps
his own intentions: it ‘surprised one with the novel sense of gag, the audac-
ity of raccord, and the freedom in movement that flirted with improvisation’6
(DC 26 October 1965).
 the o ange lopo u los as f ilm cr itic 29

AUTEUR the o r y a n d go d a r d
Angelopoulos’ serious interest in American and genre films (especially film
noirs), his taste for ‘crazy comedy’ and Tashlin, as well as his disenchantment
with the Hollywood of the 1960s, clearly indicate the influence of current
French film criticism. More particularly they reflect the impact of Cahiers du
Cinéma and the cinéphile culture developed around the French Cinémathèque
(Hillier 1985: 3; 1986: 14–15) with whom he came in close contact during his
time in Paris (1960–4). This influence is further confirmed by Angelopoulos’
devotion to the concept of authorship and the auteur criticism he applied
throughout his critical texts, a practice he shared with his fellow critics in the
newspaper.
He introduced auteur theory in his very first review, on A Distant Trumpet
(1964) by Raoul Walsh (DC 8 December 1964), and he constantly signposted
signs of authorship, ‘obsessive concerns’, in his own words, both in theme
and style, identifying several thematic and stylistic motifs as defining features
of prominent auteurs. Thus Kurosawa was inclined towards ‘great themes,
unusual dramatic situations and psychological paroxysm’ (DC 10 December
1964); Antonioni’s core themes were ‘the crisis in a couple’s relationship,
alienation and failure’ (DC 17 May 1966), while his style was defined by ‘long
shots without action, melancholic wanderings, slightly stylized décor and
evocative jazz music’ (DC 16 March 1965); Walsh’s work dealt with human
dignity and was marked by an ‘almost animalistic joy of movement’ (DC 8
December 1964), and so on. Although he highly valorised the subject matter
of a film, he also believed that authorship went beyond thematics. Thus the
distinguishing contribution of Melville in Second Breath, for example, ‘was
not the theme but basically and essentially the ability of the film director to
mark the most trivial events with a unique quality and authenticity’ (DC 24
January 1967), while Mario Bava could present the most worn conventions
‘with disarming elegance and knowledge of movement’ (DC 17 May 1966).
Angelopoulos cited a wide range of great masters including Hawks, Lang,
Welles, Bergman, and Kurosawa. However, the director he admired most was
Godard, whom he regarded as one of the most important filmmakers in the
history of cinema (DC 18 April 1967). On 31 August 1964 Democratic Change
published an anonymous article – probably expressing the Party line – in
which Godard appeared as a pretentious intellectual, his films as ‘miracles of
stupidity and banality’, and was even accused of being a fascist (DC 31 August
1964). Along with his fellow critics Angelopoulos rejected this fanatical view.
He wrote all the reviews of Godard’s films for the newspaper (except Pierrot
le Fou [1965] by Rafaelidis), namely Le Mépris (Contempt, 1963), Alphaville
(1965), Une femme mariée (A Married Woman, 1964), and Masculin Féminin
(1966) (‘one of the most positive, most radical films ever made’ [DC 18 April
30 m a r ia c halkou

1967]), all of them celebrations of his work, and returned to Godard often as
a point of reference to illustrate the parochialism or inferiority of other films.
What intrigued Angelopoulos in the work of Godard was the way he ‘writes
and rewrites, with equal anguished despair, the same story. Variations on the
same theme, every time [. . .] sharpening, however, his quest’ (DC 18 April
1967). Remarkable consistency in his understanding of film authorship is
revealed by the near reiteration of this comment, in a much later interview:
‘We are condemned to function with our obsessions. We make only one
film  [. . .] It’s all variations and fugues on the same theme’ (Fainaru 2001:
xiv). Moreover, Angelopoulos was amazed by Godard’s reflections upon the
very nature of cinema-life relationship: ‘the spectacle of life was often blended
into the spectacle of cinema [. . .] for there were moments when the myth
stopped and a direct dialogue of the characters and Godard himself with life
begun’ (DC 1 March 1966). The relationship between cinema and life, in
Angelopoulos’ view, was linked to the quest for authenticity and the ‘purity of
consciousness’ that led Godard to free narrative from explanations and shift
from the ‘supposed’ to the ‘lived’, with new forms of narration (DC 1 March
1966). The cinema–life relationship, ‘the game of reality and fiction’ (cited in
Grodent [1985] 2001: 51), as he said in an interview, and the importance of the
concept of the ‘lived’ – the ‘experienced’ – often resurfaced in Angelopoulos’
criticism. For example, it was one of the qualities he saw and appreciated in
American film noir (DC 4 January 1966) and in Second Breath (DC 24 January
1967) and it seems that he later embodied these perspectives in his own work
which so often includes real, ‘lived’, experiences from his life, such as the
biscuit scene in Το Bλέμμα του Οδυσσέα (Ulysses’ Gaze, 1995) (Horton 1997:
98) or the opening scene of Reconstruction (Fainaru [1999] 2001: 125).
Angelopoulos also admired Godard’s use of ellipsis (DC 8 February 1966),
a concept of great significance for him that showed up often in his writing. He
connects Godard’s ellipsis with the sparse narrative and the suggestive cine-
matic language that demand that the viewer actively reconstructs the narrative
flow and deciphers the narrative procedure (DC 18 April 1967). Ellipsis and
suggestion, however, are basic ingredients of Angelopoulos’ own modernist
work, as he acknowledges: ‘The ellipse is a tremendous option for the specta-
tor to become the filmmaker’s partner in the creative process’ (cited in Gregor
[1973] 2001: 12). Likewise ‘the power of suggestion is exercised dynamically
in order to free the imagination of the audience [. . .] [that] exists dynamically
and not passively, when they add their imagination to that of the director’
(cited in O’Grady [1990] 2001: 74). Part of Godard’s suggestive language, as
Angelopoulos explains with reference to Masculin Féminin, is his use of quota-
tion, namely the frequent borrowings of ‘given elements’ such as posters and
extracts from well-known writers or from magazines, a technique that recalls,
in his view, Paul Klee, Rauschenberg and pop art (DC 18 April 1967). This
 the o ange lopo u los as f ilm cr itic 31

conceptualisation, however, is strikingly similar to Angelopoulos’ practice of

quoting in his films from poems and writers’ words and including fragments
of ‘given’ cultural material, as for example in The Travelling Players which
includes diverse borrowings, such as Golfo’s verses, excerpts from pamphlets,
newspapers and books, songs, demonstration slogans and so on.
Another important element that attracted Angelopoulos’ attention in
Godard’s films was ‘dedramatisation’, ‘the constant draining of all senti-
ment’ in the quest perhaps for ‘another kind of sentiment’ (DC 19 April
1966). According to Angelopoulos ‘Godard plays down the dramatic texture
of events in order to give them an ordinariness, which sidesteps conflict and
drama – although they are still its raw material – [. . .] in order to stress the
universality of the human adventure’ (DC 5 January 1965). The plethora of
expressive novelties in Godard’s films, Angelopoulos concluded, ‘is not the
game of an insolent stylist but the result of an approach towards life and art,
which Godard himself thought moral. It is the extension of an aphorism that
once seemed paradoxical: every tracking shot is a moral act’ (DC 19 April
1966). It is not surprising that later as an established auteur Angelopoulos
openly acknowledged Godard’s influence on his work: ‘If you are looking for
an affinity, it is more in the direction of Godard you should look. He had a
certain influence on me [. . .] and on the other filmmakers of my generation’
(cited in Gregor [1973] 2001: 13).

for m and te m po r a li t y
As his film criticism reveals, Angelopoulos was deeply interested in issues
of narrative, style and technique (including cinematography, acting, sound,
colour, camera movement, editing and so on) and discussed them with the
confidence of an accomplished filmmaker, who identified positive aspects or
defects and suggested alternatives and solutions. He used the words ‘architec-
ture’ and ‘vertebration’ to stress the importance of a film’s structure and he
celebrated originality, as well as the ‘art of the minimal’ (DC 3 January 1965)
and the ‘expressive economy that refers back to silent cinema’ (DC 18 January
1966). His ideal was ‘absolute harmony between content and style’ (DC 3
January 1965), a coherent, homogeneous and united whole (DC 4 October
1966), conceptions that owed much to the Cahiers critical discourse (Hillier
1985: 78). While praising World Without Sun (1964), he observed: ‘Shooting
involves such knowledge of the subject [. . .] that there is no question of form.
There is no question of editing or angles of view. The content merges with the
form, suggesting and almost imposing the way of shooting’ (DC 29 December
1964). Moreover, the concept of ‘poetry’ was fundamental to his critical per-
ception of film and was employed as an act of transformation, of turning the
32 m a r ia c halkou

trivial, ‘the everyday into the unique’ (DC 29 December 1964). When he later
stated that ‘[t]here is no such thing as a dichotomy between content and form’
(cited in Alifragkis 2006: 14) and that ‘a film must be [. . .] a poetic event,
otherwise it does not exist’ (cited in O’Grady [1990] 2001: 70) he exhibited
considerable consistency and continuity in his perspectives on cinema.
Angelopoulos the critic placed particular emphasis on the visual and the
pictorial, which would later be central to his film work. Terms such as ‘visual
evocation’ (DC 24 May 1966), ‘visual euphoria’ (DC 15 March 1966), ‘a cel-
ebration of the gaze’ (DC 29 December 1964) and especially ‘visual stimula-
tion’ appeared repeatedly in his criticism to stress his belief in the ‘reigning of
the image’ that has its origins in silent film7 and ‘to which the entire cinema
of the new generation is devoted with religious care’ (DC 18 January 1966).
In his critical writing we can already find well-formed ideas about cinema-
tography. Angelopoulos often expressed his disapproval of beautiful images
(DC 4 May 1965) and expressionistic photography (DC 11 May 1965) as easy
practices, and made interesting points that were consistent later with his own
work. For example, while discussing Zorba the Greek (1964) he praised Walter
Lassaly’s image for softening the interplay between black and white for a more
refined and ‘gray’ photography which captures grades (DC 15 March 1965).
In his review of the Greek musical Οι Θαλασσιές oι Χάντρες (The Blue Beads,
1967) he was impressed by the ‘balanced’ and ‘homogeneous’ photography of
Arvanitis, who worked in the mainstream industry: ‘For the first time, from a
Greek cinematographer, we saw such a quality of colour, like the pastel grades
of the location image, shot under cloudy sky’ (DC 21 February 1967), stylistic
choices which as we retrospectively know dominate his film aesthetics.
The concepts of time and temporality, as well as the acts of recalling and
representing the past, became core issues in his later work from as early as
Reconstruction, although his views on them seemed to shift. In his review of
Agnès Varda’s Cléo de 5 à 7 (Cléo from 5 to 7, 1962), Angelopoulos argued that
the important element in the film was the treatment of the subject through
‘the problem of temporality’: ‘Two hours of narrative time are identified
with two hours of real time’, but in this ‘objective time intervene moments of
subjectivity’ that help Varda – who was influenced by Faulkner and interwar
literature  – to avoid temps mort (DC 8 March 1966). Commenting also on
Darling (1965), which particularly impressed him, he noticed that the film
uses ‘punctuation that dispenses with descriptive temporality for the sake of a
visual one, and also editing that refutes Eisenstein to rework the lessons of the
interwar novels of Joyce and Dos Passos’8 (DC 18 December 1966). When it
comes to the recollection of the past, he generally criticised the conventional
use of flashbacks and when he discussed Smultronstället (Wild Strawberries,
1957) he prefigured his own idiosyncratic mixing of different temporalities in
a single shot, widely used in films such as Ο Θίασος (The Travelling Players,
 the o ange lopo u los as f ilm cr itic 33

1975) and Οι Κυνηγοί (The Hunters, 1977): ‘In one of the masterpieces of
Swedish cinema, Miss Julie, Alf Sjöberg makes an interesting invasion of the
past in the present. The heroine narrates the years of her youth [. . .] and
without cut, in the same setting, the past comes alive’9 (DC 16 November
1965). Bergman in Wild Strawberries ‘reworked this idea in order to analyse a
character’ and by projecting in the same space two temporalities without the
usual clear demarcation the film emanates bitterness and pessimism (DC 16
November 1965). However in his scathing piece on the Greek film Εκείνος και
Eκείνη (Him and Her, 1967), a commercially produced film with artistic aspi-
rations, Angelopoulos asserted that such a film ‘in which time has no continu-
ity in classical terms of narrative but the fragmentation of memory’ was neither
innovative in Greek cinema nor a positive development, and he deemed the
‘mixture of the past with the present [to be] no longer a topic of interest for
novels or European cinema’ (DC 31 January 1967).
Moreover Angelopoulos made interesting comments relevant to his future
films on the representation and interpretation of history. Political correct-
ness, the condemnation, for example, of the massacre in Zulu (1964), is not
sufficient without historical explanation of the motivation behind the events
(DC 8 December 1964). When the story is seen through ‘the social and eco-
nomic contradictions of the era, it takes on unexpected facets’ and uncov-
ers ‘underground streams’ (DC 5 January 1965). ‘Respect for the external
elements of the historical frame’ (4 May 1965) and lack of sentimentality
in representing history are positive qualities of a film (DC 2 June 1965).
René Clément’s Paris brûle-t-il (Is Paris Burning?, 1966) does not succeed in
becoming a chronicle of the Liberation except when it achieves an abstract
and epic character (DC 10 January 1967). In Contempt also he was especially
interested in the use of the myth of odyssey, a core preoccupation of his
future work: ‘The affinity with the story of Ulysses’ – the film inside the
film – ‘that has a parallel dialectical development brings to the subject an
additional dimension: it becomes a dialogue between life and History’ (DC 5
January 1965).

on f i l m pe r f o r ma n c e a n d s o un d
Although in his films the actors are mostly figures and part of a wider com-
position, in the 1960s Angelopoulos was profoundly interested in actors’
performances. He always discussed casting and acting-related issues, with
particular focus on the male stars. Among his favourite actors were Brigitte
Bardot, Jeanne Moreau (who played a part in Το Μετέωρο Βήμα του
Πελαργού [The Suspended Step of the Stork, 1991]), Jean-Paul Belmondo, and
Marcello Mastroianni (the protagonist of Beekeeper and The Suspended Step of
34 m a r ia c halkou

the Stork). His comments on Belmondo’s ‘astonishing’ performance in Tendre

voyou (Tender Scoundrel, 1966) are illustrative of his tastes: ‘It could be said
that the camera exists only to capture this rare phenomenon of an actor, whose
equivalent can be found only in the dynamic cinema of Bogart and Mitchum’
(DC 8 February 1966). Similarly, discussing Casanova 70 (1965), he asserts:
‘But, of course, there is Mastroianni, who is delightful, and for whom only the
film deserves to be seen’ (DC 30 November 1965). Angelopoulos often dis-
missed the ‘tics’ and ‘negative aspects’ of the Actors Studio tradition of acting
(DC 5 April 1966) and when, in Ulysses’ Gaze, he collaborated with Harvey
Keitel, who was ‘the Method personified’ (cited in Fainaru [1996] 2001: 99),
he found the actor unable to adapt to alternative techniques of preparing his
role (cited in Fainaru 1996: 98–9). Moreover he championed dedramatised
(DC 3 January 1965) and reserved acting (‘Mifune is extravagant [. . .] but
Isuzu Yamada [. . .] acts the entire spectrum of drama with her eyes’ [DC 10
December 1964]) as well as mimic performances, which refer to silent cinema
(DC 21 February 1967). Finally, he celebrated the externalised and natural
acting in Contempt, where Bardot and Fritz Lang ‘do not play, but repeat [. . .]
themselves: the way they exist in their everyday life, their ideas, their ges-
tures, their minor routines that make up externally their personality’ (DC 5
January 1965).
Angelopoulos’ criticism exhibits an acute interest in sound and especially
aural background, the use of which he particularly admired in American
film noir (DC 4 January 1966). Fundamental to his understanding of sound
was the concept of ‘counterpoint’, which betrays the influence of Eisenstein,
believing that narrative density (DC 10 December 1964) and dramatic inten-
sity (DC 29 December 1964) can be produced by ‘contrapuntal’ use of music,
voices, and aural background10 (DC 16 November 1965). His attention to
sound is well illustrated in his analysis of Tokyo Olympiad (1965): ‘Often the
acoustic background is excluded, and the athlete, isolated by the camera, is
enclosed in the centre of a strange silence to further emphasise his deepest
loneliness’ (DC 13 April 1965). Yet the film that had had a profound impact
on him was Sidney Lumet’s The Hill (1965): ‘a great theme, an astonishing
mise en scène, a great movie!’ He praised the significance placed on the aural
background, pointing out that the role of music accompaniment in the film
was performed by ‘an endless sequence of military orders that sharpens the
harshness of the image’ (DC 9 November 1965). The importance of sound in
Angelopoulos’ work has largely escaped scholarly attention. Angelopoulos,
however, made films not simply to be seen, but equally to be heard. Days
of ’36, for example, a film with sparse dialogue – a feature widely admired
in Angelopoulos’ criticism11 – maximises the role of the aural background,
revealing lessons learned from The Hill. The clarity, volume and repetitive-
ness of the background sounds, as well as the way the long and empty shots
 the o ange lopo u los as f ilm cr itic 35

are filled with steps, galloping hooves, car engines or abstract human voices,
and even the noisy protest of prisoners hitting tin dishes against the prison
bars, refer to Lumet’s narrative and elaboration on soundtrack. One could
even dare to say that the construction of the long shots and the choreography
of the long takes, and particularly the scenes of the prison yard in Days of ’36,
were notably influenced by The Hill.

on g re e k na t i o n a l c in e m a
Angelopoulos’ writing in Democratic Change reveals his leaning towards con-
temporary French and British films and the Czech New Wave. He had a par-
ticular dislike of German cinema, regarding it as parochial, and was unafraid to
give Soviet films scathing reviews (DC 13 December 1966), despite their pro-
motion by the official Left. Moreover he rarely wrote on Greek cinema. Only
nineteen of his pieces were about Greek films, mostly short and disdainful
notes. Yet some of the Greek films he reviewed are of great significance either
because they were the subject of debate at the time, such as Zorba the Greek
(1964) and Ελευθέριος Βενιζέλος (Eleftherios Venizelos, 1965), or because they
were later acknowledged as exceptional works such as Ο Φόβος (The Fear,
1966) and Η Έβδομη Ημέρα της Δημιουργίας (The Seventh Day of Creation,
1966). It is important to keep in mind that as cinema became increasingly influ-
ential through the 1960s, a widespread public debate developed around the
need for a ‘quality’ Greek national cinema and the paths it ought to follow. It
was partly out of this debate that New Greek Cinema emerged (Chalkou 2008:
34–63) and it is precisely in this context – as part of a wider and formative dis-
course – that Angelopoulos’ views on domestic film are of particular interest.
Angelopoulos articulated a discourse on Greek film that was prominent
among intellectuals of the time. He spoke of ‘horrific stupidity’, ‘bad taste’
and films ‘made by the mentally retarded for the mentally retarded’ (DC 20
January 1965). Greek cinema was at ‘the zero year’ (DC 31 January 1967)
and suffered from a ‘permanent illness’ (DC 23 February 1966) arising from
two different sources: bad scripts (DC 19 October 1965), plagued by trivial
subjects, melodramatic plots and crude farce, and film directors who ignored
cinematic language (DC 29 July 1965) and – echoing Cahiers’ criticism of the
cinéma de papa – reduced themselves to craftsmanship and the role of an illus-
trator (DC 21 March 1967). He also believed that ‘although among the one
hundred or so worthless projects produced annually there were occasionally a
few distinctive films’ – Ο Δράκος (Ogre of Athens, 1956) by Nikos Koundouros
being the most important Greek film ever (DC 1 March 1966) – they were
isolated cases and did not open a path. Angelopoulos argued that Koundouros
and Cacoyannis had failed to create a national school. There was a wide gap
36 m a r ia c halkou

between their exceptional work and the vast majority of domestic films, which
left Greek cinema highly polarised (DC 1 March 1966).
In his review of Zorba the Greek, a film that provoked much domestic con-
troversy (Agathos 2007: 105–40), Angelopoulos distanced himself from accu-
sations of misrepresenting the Greeks, focusing instead on the film’s strategies
of literary adaptation and the inconsistency of the narrative in dramatic terms.
The widow’s murder and the death of Madame Hortense were ‘astonishing
scenes where the indisputable talent of Cacoyannis [. . .] enlarged triviality
to pathos’ through the atmosphere of ancient tragedy. The film was a failure,
‘but a fall from the heights’ (DC 15 March 1965). Moreover Angelopoulos
revealed his interest in Greek history by reviewing Eleftherios Venizelos (1965),
one of the first Greek historical feature-length documentaries and a portrait
of Greece’s foremost liberal politician. The prohibition of the film by the new
government of Αποστασία (Defection), which condemned it as an artless work
that insulted the audience, was motivated by the film’s antimonarchy content.
Angelopoulos wrote on Venizelos when it was screened privately for journal-
ists and vehemently rejected the official line by making a political statement
against censorship in the arts (DC 29 July 1965).
Angelopoulos also reviewed two Greek musicals, Διπλοπενιές (Dancing the
Sirtaki, 1966) and Οι Θαλασσιές οι Χάντρες (The Blue Beads, 1967), confirm-
ing his interest in the genre and questioning Greek cultural authenticity in
relation to foreign cinematic traditions and European receptivity. In his view,
thanks to its director, Dancing the Sirtaki was the first authentic attempt at
a Greek musical which departed from domestic cultural specificities to suc-
cessfully join the American and European tradition. Skalenakis displayed ‘an
undeniable visual sensibility, an enviable sense of rhythm, imagination, ele-
gance (DC 15 March 1966).12 Dalianidis’s film, by contrast, was neither true
to the genre nor authentically Greek and could not be considered musical. The
film failed to adapt the elegant conventions of the genre and invested heavily
in national stereotypes – from a western European viewpoint – to increase
exportability (DC 21 February 1967).
The Fear by Manousakis is one of the most artful, dark, critically sharp and
powerful films made by the commercial industry in an attempt to bridge the
gap between popular and art film (Chalkou 2008: 100–65) and restore what
Angelopoulos had identified as the polarisation of Greek cinema. Angelopoulos
acknowledged positive features in the film: the accomplished cinematic lan-
guage, modernist idiom, dedramatised acting and dialogue which does not ‘par-
aphrase’ the image but suggests. However, surprisingly perhaps, he accused the
film of formalism, of being aesthetically overloaded while neglecting its subject
matter (DC 1 March 1966). The Seventh Day of Creation was another attempt
by the mainstream industry at artistic and socially-engaged films,  which
was a major demand of the era in relation to domestic cinema (Chalkou
 the o ange lopo u los as f ilm cr itic 37

2008: 34–63). Nevertheless Angelopoulos was particularly severe:  although

Georgiades moved the camera skilfully and the setting was authentic, the script,
written by the acclaimed playwright Kambanellis, was nonsensical, featuring
fake and almost psychopathological characters, who did not represent the Greek
youth. And although the ‘generation gap’ was a core topic of ‘New Cinema’ in
general, its treatment by the film was frivolous and entirely fictitious (DC 13
December 1966). By rejecting the industry’s attempts to follow the European film
canon and be progressive, Angelopoulos made clear that the rejuvenation of Greek
cinema – the ‘New’ – would come from creative forces beyond the establishment.

co nc lu s i o n
Angelopoulos’ critical writing in Democratic Change has escaped public and
scholarly attention for decades. This chapter has attempted a close reading
of Angelopoulos’ unexplored critical work to reveal his remarkably rich cul-
tural and cinéphile background. It focuses on genre and auteur criticism, his
relationship with Godard, important issues in relation to form, content and
narrative, his ideas on Greek cinema, as well as how his writing is reflected in
his filmmaking practices. It also traces interesting critical attitudes (such as his
independence from the Party line), unexpected tastes (such as his love of James
Bond films), and possible unnoticed influences (such as Lumet’s The Hill).
As his critical writing suggests, Angelopoulos possessed the charisma of a
free-spirited, well-informed, cultivated and imaginative mind with exceptional
critical and analytical skills. It is not accidental that discussing his ‘keen grasp of
the director’s role in shaping critical appropriation of his films’, David Bordwell
points out that when assisting the interpretation of his work, ‘[h]e can come up
with a lapidary formula that many critics would envy’ (1997: 11). As Bordwell
suggests, Angelopoulos, a self-conscious auteur, spoke as a critic. And he was a
critic who spoke as a filmmaker: he considered and discussed the questions that
most interested him, expressing the concerns and evolving, or already well-
formed, ideas of a future film director. We cannot deny the possibility that criti-
cal activity might have helped him to sharpen his gaze and systematise his ideas
and vision of cinema. In light of his eventual films and the rhetoric he developed
on cinema, we can identify a self-reflective auteur and a self-reflective critic
whose opinions on cinema indicate remarkable consistency and continuity.

no t e s
1. United Democratic Left, the political and parliamentary front of the banned Communist
Party in the 1950s and 1960s.
38 m a r ia c halkou

2. There were also a few appearances by Ninos Fenek Mikelides and Dimitris Stavrakas,
while Dimitris Gionis and Fontas Ladis occasionally contributed film reportages and
interviews.
3. There was a blurring of the lines between film writing and filmmaking. All the critics of
Democratic Change, including Rafailidis, made attempts at short films in the 1960s
(Chalkou 2008: 98 and 233–306).
4. For example Democratic Change organised and published over six issues (24 March–1
April 1967) an open discussion about Greek cinema under the title ‘Young filmmakers
and their problems: Greek cinema has reached a stalemate’.
5. DC is an abbreviation for Democratic Change.
6. His review of Lester’s second film with Beatles Help! (1965), however, was dismissive.
(DC 7 December 1965).
7. Silent cinema was a recurrent point of reference in Angelopoulos’ criticism. David
Bordwell made a connection between Angelopoulos’ aesthetics and early cinema when
stating that his ‘more distant framings [are] reminiscent of the cinema prior to 1915’.
(1997: 20)
8. It is noteworthy that Angelopoulos was enthusiastic about Darling and a connection
between his short H Eκπομπή (The Broadcast, 1968) – the shooting of which started in
1966 (Themelis 1998: 28) – and Schlesinger’s film can be clearly traced. The opening
long-lasting scene of Darling shows a huge poster of the ‘ideal woman’ being put up,
while Angelopoulos’ short is structured around the quest by the media for the ‘ideal
man’. Both films deal with alienation and illusionism in media and advertising scenes,
while street interviews, studio work and cityscapes play a key role in the narrative.
9. Miss Julie (1951) has often been mentioned by Angelopoulos in his interviews on the
same topic. (O’Grady 1990: 71)
10. It is important to note that the notion of ‘counterpoint’ was central in Angelopoulos’
rhetoric on film irrespective of sound.
11. For example: ‘In the advantages of the film we should add the sparse dialogue. The
camera holds the narrative and the few spoken words are sounds among other sounds’
(DC 26 April 1966).
12. This, however, was forgotten one year later when Angelopoulos, reviewing The Blue
Beads, argued that in the Greek context – as with Westerns and crime films – musicals
were ‘unthinkable’ and that the only noteworthy attempt at adapting the genre was
Καλημέρα Αθήνα (Good Morning Athens, 1960) by Gregoriou (DC 21 February 1967).