“Simply put, we feel the fictive in reality and the reality of fiction simultaneously in Angelopoulos’s work, with this ‘tag’ note: while Angelopoulos often refers to Brecht and the need for an audience to think as well as feel in theater and cinema, we do not experience anything close to what co
“More than Reconstruction, Angelopoulos’s direct indictment of the Junta came in 1972 with his film Days of ’36 [Meres tou ’36].
“History is the first aporia of his work. One could easily refer to the famous letter by Friedrich Engels, that history as it happened is something that no one ever wanted.
“The Hunters reflects how a man of my generation sees Greek history, a history whose continuation blends with the years of my own life. It is a study of the historical conscience of the Greek bourgeoisie. In Greece, the ruling class is afraid of history and, for this reason, hides it.
“Through his lens, Angelopoulos looks at things in silence. It is the weight of this silence and the intensity of the immobile stare of Angelopoulos’ camera which makes O Megalexandros so powerful that the viewer cannot break away from the screen.
“Before I saw Angelopoulos’s film, I, who had been brought up without a father, would never have thought that I would discover him in the image of a tree. This last scene of Landscape in the Mist was a revelation for me.