Angelopoulos’ Ulysses Gaze: Where the Old meets the New

In this essay I will attempt to outline how Angelopoulos deals with the concepts of time and memory through an approach that does not treat the image as a 'given' to be illustrated, but as an open field where questions on perception and representation are asked. This leads me to question the director's insistence on the use of long takes and their apparent function as an attempt to trace meaning in what the director sees as an era of confusion after the collapse of the grand narratives of the Left. Deleuze's concept of the time image comes as one of the useful terms to speak about the film in the attempt to trace its originality.

The reels are the first filmic footage ever made in the Balkans.A.'s trip takes him through a double journey: a geographic one, through the Balkans at war with a bombed Sarajevo as its final geographical destination, and through a temporal one, revisiting his past, the history of the Manaki brothers and the history of the Balkan.Time splits open, with one vector pointing towards the future and other dwelling into the past.
In this essay I will attempt to outline how Angelopoulos deals with the concepts of time and memory through an approach that does not treat the image as a 'given' to be illustrated, but as an open field where questions on perception and representation are asked.This leads me to question the director's insistence on the use of long takes and their apparent function as an attempt to trace meaning in what the director sees as an era of confusion after the collapse of the grand narratives of the Left.Deleuze's concept of the time image comes as one of the useful terms to speak about the film in the attempt to trace its originality.The film's first sequence, which stands as a haiku prefacing the rest, is also a remarkable illustration of the convergence of the director's approach with Deleuze's FORUM 'Origins and Originality' http://forum.llc.ed.ac.uk/ 2 reflection on film and time.The Thessaloniki tableau starts with a fade in on a tracking shot accompanied by a voice off screen: 'It was that winter of '54 when Yannakis Mannakis saw a blue ship moored in the harbour of Salonica.I was his assistant back then.He had a longing to photograph it as it sailed.One morning the ship set sail…' While we listen to the voice, the camera reveals an old photographer, dressed in fifties clothing, and his assistant (in contemporary clothes) who turns out to be the source of the voice over.A blue ship makes an entrance in the background, at sea, from the right side of the frame, and simultaneously, within the visual field of the photographic lens.At this point, Yannakis reaches for his heart.His assistant comes to his aid and calmly places the dying man on a chair behind him.He then starts walking towards the place where the camera started the tracking shot.The camera follows him while he is addressing someone off screen to the right.The tracking movement reveals the presence of A., who seems to have been watching all along from off screen to the right.A. moves to the left, passes the assistant, taking the camera's focus along with him, and 'forces' it to make a reversing movement.As he returns to the edge of the bay however, the old photographer's body is no longer there and neither is his photographic equipment.The camera captures the blue ship while A. is still framed gazing away at it.Karaindrou's non diegetic musical theme is introduced while the camera zooms in to isolate the ship, leaving A. out of the frame.
A time span of forty years is presented within a uniformity of time and space in the representational field, with one long take.The camera moves back and forth as if moving in time.Yannakis Manakis died in '54 and A. is standing in the same place in 1994, in the diegetic present.The assistant is standing by the old photographer yet he is himself old and dressed in the clothes of the present.His walk in the bay marks a passage in time.The camera starts with a fade in at a certain point in time, but it does not start from A.. Rather, it goes to him after we have seen the photographer, after the oral testimony of an eye witness.What we experience in this sequence is not a linear narrative where past present and future are segments that succeed each other on a horizontal scale.
There is no division between subjective and objective points of view that would in turn authorise the external reality of establishing shots to include the subjectivity of the internal point of views.
FORUM 'Origins and Originality' http://forum.llc.ed.ac.uk/ 3 A standard way of filming the sequence would be to connect the old photographer with the memory of either the assistant or A.. This would be designated by a break up of the sequence into a succession of shots that would form a flashback.The flashback usually refers to the subjectivity of a character that is experiencing a recollection.This is a hierarchical arrangement where the recollection is subordinated and bracketed by the objective shots of a character thinking or an objective present action that in order to progress needs an explanation from the past.In turn it serves as a break that verifies the organic movement of the plot towards the future.A flashback is usually designated by a dissolve or a fade in, for instance.
The Thessaloniki bay sequence, however, is not a flashback.The ship is seen simultaneously from the point of view of the photographer, A., and the point of view of the camera.The uniformity of the space through out the time span is not a designation of time launching forth to the future thus the palindrome movement.The sequence is a pure 'time image' where time is not integral to subjectivity but rather the opposite, consciousness is internal and constituted by time.This is Deleuze's reading of Bergson and this is what I believe that the Thessaloniki sequence reveals.A virtual image is not a psychological or a dream image, it is a mental image reconstructed in consciousness not according to a chronological succession, a new image that appears without relation to the present it once was.So we have the present as the actual image and the past, which is contemporaneous as a virtual or mirror image.
This can be experienced in everyday life in the moments of déjà-vu where perception and recollection happen simultaneously.This recollection does not belong to a past of a once actual present nor has it to be actualised in a virtual present of a personal recollection.Although the Thessaloniki sequence contains evident marks of historical time, it is the image of the ship that becomes an image of an objective virtual past contemporaneous with the present consciousness of both diegetic characters and the camera in extension.The ship cannot be placed in an actual historical present or past nor does it coincide with a singular point of view.Likewise, it makes an entrance until it is isolated by the camera only to pass quietly off screen to the left.The ship cannot be pinned down in time for it is in constant motion.The camera and the diegetic characters all share the same point of view in what I may describe as a shared subjectivity.It is this shared subjectivity of internal gazing that authorises the form of the film and makes a recurrent palindrome movement from past to present.
The two movements described in the quote above could be said to correspond to two vectors of the film: A. does indeed move towards Sarajevo in a horizontal line of chronological time which is subordinated to movement.Simultaneously, however, he moves alongside another (vertical or non-chronological) line that constitutes the déjà vu incidents where he takes the place of Yannakis Manakis.His quest for the reels that represent an age of innocence where cinema contained the dynamics of a new form and the hope that their acquisition will trigger a new beginning both personal and collective, bring him in absolute contemporaneity with Manakis, thus forming a shared subjectivity.
Angelopoulos follows the same rhythm, downplaying hierarchies among the sequences, throughout the film.A simple cut transfers A. to the past while he passes the Scopian border to Bulgaria.There is something uncanny about the sequence where he is arrested by the Bulgarian authorities.The policemen are dressed in early twentieth century clothing and we, as viewers, realise that A., as he faces the prosecutor who is reading him the accusations, is now Yannakis.Is the scene a hallucination?The cut as a means to break the sequence does not help to clarify the transition in time but rather blurs the borders between the real and the imagined, between a world, which is perceived as a cause and effect system and a world of rupture where things are ambiguous.There is obviously a time lapse in the perception of the images.The audience can make out the transition only in retrospect, since the passage to the questioning room does not signify a time transition.It is only after the accusations are read that we realise that we are in the beginning of the century.The time transition is transferred from the cut to the mise en scène.The effect is to charge the image with the potential to be questioned.Instead of following the action the viewer is propelled to wonder about what it is that he/she is seeing 'now' and thus encouraged to be involved intellectually rather than as passive consumer of a driven action.And as the cause for the transition is not directed to a previous agent in the narrative, the question of its significance remains suspended.
It is as if the camera, by shifting its signification from the cut to the mise en scène, follows the same principle of an observer trying to make out what the situation is rather than illustrating a given story.In the Korytsa sequence the audience derives the sensation of an exile returning home only to face a second exile.It is a signification moving from the particular to the general, but the audience is not licensed with a full explanation.The image is not so much an intellectual image -although the arrangement creates an audio visual montage where the ascetic figure is contrasted with a wide open space surrounded by concrete and her silence gives way to the chanting of a hodza (Muslim priest) as signifier of the post communist return of religion in Albania.It provides a sensation of deprivation, a feeling of angst among the ruined houses.The sequence opens up to the world outside of the frame, outside of the fiction.Why is the woman at odds with the environment?Is it just because it is ugly?The image is bleak but the viewer is not privileged with an explanation connecting the scene with the history of the Greek minority in Northern Epirus.The image simply provides a sense of loss based on the documented reality.It implies its meaning but this is not superimposed on the viewer.
The montage works internally.It is as if the real settings will speak for themselves the history that has been played out before them.The rendering of the truth is passed on from the uttered word to the recorded image.The audience starts off with an impression and the choice of moving to the particular concepts that this impression alludes to is left entirely up to them.main character to wander through a world that seems like a maze.One thing is certain, that the persistence of the internal rhythm of the long take and the static shot that Angelopoulos employs, carry traces of an early cinema like that of the Manaki brothers as we see in The weavers.It is a persistence that the director makes present not only as an attempted realist aesthetic but also as a form of resistance to an action driven narrative as a form of abbreviating time.
A new beginning?
Antonioni claimed that now that the bicycle is no longer there, referring to De Sica's Bicycle Thieves, a new signification is at stake (Cinema 2 284).The worker in the Bicycle Thieves had a functional target.The bicycle was a means for living and for many, mostly outside the western world, still is.It becomes apparent though that in Ulysses' Gaze, A.'s quest for the reels is not of a practical nature.Rather, it takes the form of a vow, in the same way as a religious people would make offerings and a pilgrimage in the name of a saint.This ritual however, through the form of the film, does not follow a preexisting order of cause and effect, for it is the autonomy of the elements shaping the narrative, which constitute assemblages breaking away from the plot like the stretches of dead time deprived of any dramatic action.
When A. is waiting for the Archivist in his subterranean office, or when the hospitalised in an asylum make their exit from the building in Sarajevo, what we are presented with is an optical image; the camera persists on a fixed frame until almost all the characters are out.There is no plot connected drive.A ritual presupposes a deliberate act of faith in a pre-existing order to bring deliverance.Accordingly, A. does not put forward the action, he rather seems to be recording, archiving so that many voices come to the foreground.As if the boundaries of past, present, and future or the real and the imagined, blend in his memory to form not a relative perspective or a hallucination but a new assemblage.This can be seen in the Kostanza sequence for instance, where the image of his mother entering the frame / his mind, leads him to the family congregation for the celebration of the 1945 New Years Eve in an almost Proustian, involuntary manner.
Deleuze, starting from Bergson's notion of the durée, describes a time crystal of an indivisible unity between an actual image and its virtual image where a non chronological past is preserved.What is actual is always a present.But the present changes or passes.It becomes past when it no longer is, when a new present replaces it.But this is meaningless.It is clearly necessary for it to pass on for the new present to arrive, and it is clearly necessary for it to pass at the same time as it is present.[…] Since the past is constituted not after the present that it was but at the same time, time has to split itself in two at each moment as present and past, which differ from each other in nature, or, what amounts to the same thing, it has to split the present in two heterogeneous directions, one of which is launched towards the future while the other falls into the past.(Cinema 2 9-81)

FORUM'
Origins and Originality' http://forum.llc.ed.ac.uk/ 6 At a latter point in the narrative, the shot of the fragmented Lenin statue is given from a point of view that scrutinizes it starting from a detail of the broken pointing hand, then moving to the head and around the statue thanks to the circular movement of the boat that carries the statue.This evokes what Deleuze has called 'a pure optical and sound image' (Cinema 2 3).Deleuze uses these terms to describe the breaking down of an action driven narrative in which the image, in a given situation, presents the reaction of a character to a previous cause which is identifiable either by her or the audience.The optical image creates new signs and it is born, among other things, when the characters face situations where the ability of a logical response collapses.They turn from actors to seers.The image breaks away from the continuity of a developing plot, it serves no specific dramatic function, and its relation to the rest of the film is not one of cause and effect but one subordinated to an internal rhythm that brings the images together.The image of the statue is not subordinated to an action in the way that a sequence of shots in, say, a Hitchcock film would analyse the act of signifying a murder (as in Psycho where 'the set of relations in which the action and the one who did it are caught' (Cinema 1 200) and interpreted).In a narrative of this kind the audience is usually not left with any questions on what the images signify.Conversely, the optical image of the Lenin statue stands for a new way of seeing, one that poses a question of what thoughts are designated while framing the fragmented statue of an order that has been so rigidly signified.A. is inside the boat with the statue but, it is as if the objective shot of the riverboat includes his point of view as well as if he is watching himself drifting along with the boat.Even the implied symbolism of the funeral, with people gathering at the banks of the river making the sign of the cross while the boat floats on by, carries secondary signification compared to the persistence of the autonomous recording of the physical matter.Is this secondary signification nostalgia?Where does the finger point now and if it still carries significance, does it relate to the direction of the disillusioned director inside the film?Maybe Lyotard is right when he claims that the modernist aesthetic fills the absence of meaning in the content by satisfying the Kantian pleasure principle through form (81).It seems for Angelopoulos that the portrayal of a world of alienation, where the signs of previous ideological regimes have collapsed, leaves his FORUM 'Origins and Originality' http://forum.llc.ed.ac.uk/ 7