Theo Angelopoulos, a renowned Greek writer-director whose "Eternity and a Day" won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1998, is being honored with a two-month retrospective at the Hammer Museum's Billy Wilder Theater in Westwood, California. The retrospective of one's professional life began on October 14 and will last through December 18.
The tribute, Landscapes of Time: The Films of Theo Angelopoulos, features each of the director's feature films as well as a number of his short films.
From the middle of the 1970s until his passing in 2012, Angelopoulos was a significant figure in the Greek cinema industry. His movies frequently feature protagonists whose individual journeys get interwoven with the ebb and flow of history, drawing on his personal experiences with the turbulent events occurring in Greece.
While many moviegoers have found Angelopoulos' films unforgiving and difficult, they are ultimately rewarded by his work's distinctive storytelling, epic scope, and stunning imagery — all elements that have sustained the director's victories at numerous prestigious film festivals over the years, including Berlin, Thessaloniki, and Venice as well as Cannes.
In addition to "Eternity and a Day," Angelopoulos is known for making the controversial films "The Travelling Players" (1975), which was used as a political pawn in Greece before a copy was secretly transported to Cannes, "Landscape in the Mist" (1988), which won best film at the European Film Awards, and "Ulysses' Gaze" (1995), which won the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes.
Willem Dafoe plays a filmmaker on a quest to make a movie about his émigré Russian parents that spans 50 years, moves across countries, and alternates between the past and present in the auteur's 2008 film "The Dust of Time" (shown above).
The UCLA Film & Television Archive, the UCLA Stavros Niarchos Center for the Study of Hellenic Culture, the Los Angeles Greek Film Festival, and the UCLA Center for European and Russian Studies all lend support to the Angelopoulos tribute, which is organized by the Greek Consulate General in Los Angeles.
