Like life, movies exist in time. Unlike life, they don’t exist in space. The closest they come is with the handful of directors who can endow a screen’s two-dimensions with an illusion of volume and extent. Just as montage mocks time, so does the tracking shot exalt space. When that exaltation consistently occurs — as it does in the work of a Kenji Mizoguchi or Max Ophuls or Theo Angelopoulos — it is unmistakable, unforgettable, and unlike anything else in the movies.
The third name on that list is little known in this country. The Harvard Film Archive is showing a complete retrospective, ’’Eternity and History — The Cinema of Theo Angelopoulous.’’ It runs through Aug. 22.
Prepare to be astonished. Angelopoulos (1935-2012) moves the camera in a way that’s part reportage, part ritual. The fact that the viewer can’t say where one ends and the other begins helps make these movies so powerful, even overwhelming. Space and motion become emotion.
“Alexander the Great’’ (1980) has what must be the most beautiful prison break in film history, urgent yet unhurried, laid out with a Euclidean clarity. Such beauty makes sense, since all of Angelopoulos’s mature films are about the liberation of space. His camera inhabits space, with tracking shots and pans and slow zooms that can create the grandeur of a cathedral interior.
Angelopoulos’s camera is patient, content to wait for things to happen. He loves long takes as much as he loves camera movement. His films have imperial rhythms. What’s commonly regarded as his masterpiece, “The Travelling Players’’ (1975), lasts nearly four hours. It’s said to have no more than 80 cuts.
There’s nothing restless or showy about Angelopoulos’s camera. Yet stately and sumptuous are too limited as descriptions. Inevitability might be the best word for it. As the painter Philip Guston once wrote of the Renaissance master Piero della Francesca, “Possibly, it is not a ‘picture’ we see, but the presence of a necessary and generous law.’’
Angelopoulos (pronounced with a hard g) grew up in Athens. Dropping out of law school, he moved to Paris and became a film student. He worked for Jean Rouch, the great documentary filmmaker, and as an usher at the Cinémathèque Française. What better teacher could a director have? What better school? Angelopoulos learned there to love Mizoguchi and Orson Welles and F.W. Murnau, all three of whom Harvey Keitel’s film-director hero toasts in “Ulysses’ Gaze’’ (1995).
Ulysses is Homer’s greatest hero, of course, and that title is a reminder of another defining element in Angelopoulos, as is the title of “Alexander the Great.’’ Angelopoulos’s obsession with his homeland’s epic past matches his epic use of the camera.
Greek culture is the fountainhead of Western civilization, the source of philosophy, democracy, dramatic tragedy. The rest of us, even Murnau and Welles, are an afterthought to that achievement. Greek priority gives a universal quality to so much of what goes on in Angelopoulos’s films — even as the intense clannishness of his people can make what we see seem tribal and insular. It’s a clash he uses to excellent effect.
The weight of centuries alternately sustains and drowns Angelopoulos’s characters. In “The Weeping Meadow’’ (2004), a group of black-clad mothers keening over their dead sons during the Greek civil war could be taken from “The Trojan Women.’’ In “The Hunters’’ (1977), modern-day soldiers march along, singing that “In our trenches/ Leonidas and his 300 fight.’’ It’s impossible not to share the awe of a group of English toffs in “Alexander the Great’’ as they look out on the Aegean from Poseidon’s temple. The year is 1900. It could as easily be 2000 — or 2000 BCE.
Historical memory, for Angelopoulos, is of a piece with cultural memory. The Greeks’ reverse diaspora after World War I, interwar fascism, the Popular Front, World War II, the civil war, the colonels’ junta figure throughout the work. A title like “Days of ’36’’ (1972) makes this imperative explicit. But it’s there in all sorts of unexpected ways, as with how a Communist guerrilla’s exile in the Soviet Union, in “Voyage to Cythera’’ (1984) devastated his marriage.
“The first thing God created was the journey,’’ a character says in “Ulysses’ Gaze.’’ Journeying, both figurative and literal, is central to Angelopoulos — journeys through time as well as space. Sometimes the journey takes place in a single shot. “Alexander the Great’’ concludes with a pan that begins with Athens then, at the turn of the last century, and ends with the present-day city.
It’s not just Angelopoulos’s camera that’s so given to moving. In “Ulysses’ Gaze,’’ a barge bearing a colossal statue of Lenin also carries Keitel up the Danube. Bruno Ganz’s beat-up VW station wagon, in “Eternity and a Day’’ (1998), isn’t in much better shape than the truck Marcello Mastroianni’s title character drives in “The Beekeeper’’ (1986). They’re dramatic vehicles in both senses of the word.
Someone obsessed with journeys can’t help but be obsessed with borders. Time may have no boundaries for Angelopoulos. Yet as a man very much of the left, he’s all too aware that space does. Refugees and exiles figure throughout his work. He has a gift for startling, indelible tableaux, like that lashed-down Lenin — or a hotel lobby littered with smashed television sets, in his last (and most conventional) movie, “The Dust of Time’’ (2009). Such images are Angelopoulos’s magical-realism side. The most stunning of all, from “The Suspended Step of the Stork’’ (1991), shows a wedding taking place on two sides of a river, the bride on the Greek bank, the groom on the Albanian.
Like refugees and exiles, marriages recur throughout Angelopoulos’s movies, as do trains, musicians, snow, fog, rain. It’s the climate of a washed-out, blueish-gray world that’s Mediterranean only in geographic proximity. Landscape, like weather, becomes expressive. The two unite in the title of “Landscape in the Mist’’ (1988).
For someone so drawn to performer-characters, like the stage troupe in “The Travelling Players,’’ Angelopoulos isn’t an actor’s director. He’s more interested in types — or archetypes — than individuals. Or there’s that expressivity of landscape. Not even Jeanne Moreau, in “Suspended Step of the Stork,’’ shows as much character as the harsh terrain of the village in Angelopoulos’s first feature, “Reconstruction’’ (1970).
Wildly ambitious, sometimes thrillingly so, sometimes awkwardly, Angelopoulos trades in upper-case concepts: History, Humanity, Home, even Hair. That bride in “The Suspended Step of the Stork’’ has a head of it Helen of Troy would envy. So much high seriousness can get wearying — though less so than the low mindlessness we’ve grown used to pretty much everywhere else.
Angelopoulos has a real weakness for the sententious, something his frequent use of voice-overs doesn’t help. Maybe his wisdom seems less wooden in Greek? The films largely lack humor, but not entirely. Snatches of “As Time Goes By’’ can be heard in real time in at least four of his movies. Even Angelopoulos recognized that it could be his unofficial theme song.
It’s time of a special sort, more circular than linear; not past, present, and future, but past, present, and past. His plots aren’t so much narratives or progressions as armatures: for ideas, images, gestures. Gesture matters as much as emotion. Often gesture is emotion. Angelopoulos isn’t a storyteller, really. Stories rely on psychological realism and cause and effect. He’s a mythmaker. He shows. He observes. He doesn’t explain. As Ganz’s poet-hero says in “Eternity and a Day,’’ “It’s better not to know . . . and to imagine.’’ To explain is to trivialize, to diminish, to reduce. And reductive Theo Angelopoulos’s filmmaking is not.
Go to hcl.harvard.edu/hfa/films/2016junaug/angelopoulos.html for a schedule.
Mark Feeney can be reached at mfeeney@globe.com.
