Os filmes de viagem mística de Theo Angelopoulos: Uma jornada pelos bálcãs

Abstract

Filmmaker Theo Angelopoulos was born in Athens in 1935 and passed away in the Greek city of Piraeus in 2012. Throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, he directed five travel films that addressed global and regional conflicts, Greek political instability, humanitarian issues, and the personal and collective questions of the Balkans in the 20th century. The two productions from the 1990s, Ulysses' Gaze (To vlemma tou Odyssea, 1995) and Eternity and a day (Mia aioniotita kai mia mera, 1998), noticeably distinguish themselves from the previous projects. In these two films, the journeys take place across the Balkan Peninsula, and the characters directly confront the problems of that time, such as the war in the former Yugoslavia and the refugee crisis. Throughout the journey, there is the development of individual and collective identities of that place in opposition to the Balkanist discourse, which is so reductive. The protagonists go through mythical phenomena and return to their past, acting alongside their family and friends, participating in historical events. The images are marked by distant framing and long takes, which lead to a Brechtian de-dramatization, silence and contemplative states. The iconography of these productions is marked by snow, clouds and fog. Our research aims to conceptualize and point out the fundamental aspects of these travel films with a mystical nature, present their theoretical bases and contextualize these productions within the Greek filmmaker's body of work, differentiating them from his previous works of the same genre.