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by Andrew Horton (Author)
Greek film director Theo Angelopoulos is one of the most influential and widely respected filmmakers in the world today, yet his films are still largely unknown to the American public. In the first book in English to focus on Angelopoulos's unique cinematic vision, Andrew Horton provides an illuminating contextual study that attempts to demonstrate the quintessentially Greek nature of the director's work. Horton situates the director in the context of over 3,000 years of Greek culture and history. Somewhat like Andrei Tarkovsky in Russia or Antonioni in Italy, Angelopoulos has used cinema to explore the history and individual identities of his culture. With such far-reaching influences as Greek myth, ancient tragedy and epic, Byzantine iconography and ceremony, Greek and Balkan history, modern Greek pop culture including bouzouki music, shadow puppet theater, and the Greek music hall tradition, Angelopoulos emerges as an original "thinker" with the camera, and a distinctive director who is bound to make a lasting contribution to the art form.
In a series of films including The Travelling Players, Voyage to Cythera, Landscape in the Mist, The Suspended Step of the Stork, and most recently in Ulysses' Gaze starring Harvey Keitel (winner of the 1995 Cannes Film Festival Grand Prix), Angelopoulos has developed a remarkable cinematic style, characterized by carefully composed scenes and an enormous number of extended long shots. In an age of ever decreasing attention spans, Angelopoulos offers a cinema of contemplation.Back Jacket
"Theo Angelopoulos is a masterful filmmaker. He really understands how to control the frame. There are sequences in his work--the wedding scene in The Suspended Step of the Stork; the rape scene in Landscape in the Mist; or any given scene in The Traveling Players--where the slightest movement, the slightest change in distance, sends reverberations through the film and through the viewer. The total effect is hypnotic, sweeping, and profoundly emotional. His sense of control is almost otherworldly."--Martin Scorsese
"Horton's book fills a crucial gap in film studies by bringing to attention the work of a European filmmaker whose films remain unfamiliar to many. This book is an extraordinary study of a major artist and one that should help make Angelopoulos a much better known figure in this country."--Stuart McDougal, University of Michigan
"The interpretive conception, the argument, and the conclusion of this book are nothing short of brilliant. It is as if Angelopoulos comes into his own with Andrew Horton's writing. It could become a model for film writing, not least for its expansive ideological and historical perceptions."--John Chioles, New York University
Author Biography
Andrew Horton is Jeanne H. Smith Professor of Film and Video Studies at the University of Oklahoma. He is the author of Writing the Character Centered Screenplay, Russian Critics on a Cinema of Glasnost, and Comedy/Cinema/Theory, and coauthor, with Michael Brashinsky, of The Zero Hour: Glasnost and Soviet Cinema in Transition.
