7 Through these deliberate attempts to extend the viewer’s experience of temporality, Angelopoulos’ long takes, instead of masking time, foregrounds its Bergsonian duration, a spectatorial effect that is evident within Ulysses’ Gaze. Ulysses’ Gaze: Long Takes and the Temporalization of SpaceĪnalyzing Angelopoulos’ renowned long take style, David Bordwell has enumerated several formal and narrative features that his films manipulate within long takes in order to slow down a shot’s dramatic rhythm they include the sparseness of the frame, muted action, and dead intervals within his distanced long takes. Through these diverse means, Angelopoulos injects historical arguments into the film’s subtext and offers a unique alternative to the Balkanist gaze, which links A.’s personal sense of past and ongoing historical events to a shared collective experience of the Balkan past and present. Once accomplished, it is his belief that “time will be whole again” and it may finally be possible for the cycle of violence and separation in the Balkans to end.Īlthough Ulysses’ Gaze may initially seem to operate under a cyclical conception of Balkan history similar to that perpetuated by Balkanism, Angelopoulos’ affective use of a long take style, the film’s very specific representation of historical cyclicality, and its original presentation of involuntary memory re-historicize the Balkans by foregrounding an indivisible conception of temporality and historical continuity. nostalgically wishes to complete a cycle and re-connect with an intangible Balkan “home” or Ithaca embodied by his lost beloved, who is played by Maia Morgenstern.
#Fn 1905 explained free
desperately wishes to free this lost gaze upon the Balkans because it is not constructed by a biased western perspective, nor is it blinded by the seemingly pervading sense of darkness and chaos that he feels to be present within the former Yugoslavia of the early 1990s. undertakes a journey across the Balkans in search of three undeveloped reels shot by the Manakis brothers, two early 20th century Greek filmmakers who captured crucial, historical changes within the Balkans through cinema. 4 In common with Orientalist representations of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, Balkanism constructs the Balkans as a symbol “conveniently located outside historical time.” 5 However, Dina Iordanova has stated that, in opposition to this ahistorical process, the new Balkan cinema created by filmmakers like Theo Angelopoulos have begun to unearth formerly “hushed histories” within the Balkan past.
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Seeking to define this existing western discourse, Maria Todorova has adopted the term “Balkanism” and, while it is similar to Edward Said’s characterization of Orientalism, its undertones of territorial instability differentiate it from the latter. Niko: A rhetorical answer…off-hand…Danger is my business, but the truth is that most of the correspondents when they want to send in a story or the latest news go to various army units outside Belgrade and stage the war there…at the cost of a few dollars. In an exchange between the film’s unnamed Odysseus-like protagonist A., played by Harvey Keitel, and his journalist friend Niko, Niko specifically alludes to western media’s tendency to construct Balkan history:Ī.: How do journalists manage to get to the war zone? Isn’t it terribly risky? 3 Theo Angelopoulos’ historical epic Ulysses’ Gaze (1995) confronts this reality within its narrative. Throughout the late twentieth century, the gaze of the western media has continuously reduced the Balkans 1 into what Slajov Zizek has termed a “spectacle of a timeless, incomprehensible, mythical cycle of passions.” 2 In his book European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood (2005), Thomas Elsaesser has similarly recognized the presence of this dehistoricizing gaze upon the Balkans within the West. Historical Argument, Involuntary Memory, and the Subversion of Balkanist Discourse within Theo Angelopoulos’ Ulysses’ Gazeīy Alain Chouinard Volume 20, Issue 2 / February 2016 27 minutes (6650 words)