Filmgoers May See the Light in the Acclaimed ‘Eternity’

Theo Angelopoulos is a modern Homer, a Greek director as acclaimed as he is challenging with his stately, complex film odysseys. His latest, Greece’s official Oscar entry, is the elegiac “Eternity and a Day,” and it screens tonight at 8 at the Palm Springs International Film Festival.

“Eternity” stars veteran German actor Bruno Ganz as an acclaimed writer and poet facing death, overcome by memories of the past and longing to come to terms with his fate. Angelopoulos is perhaps best known for “The Traveling Players,” a monumental, surreal confrontation with Greece’s turbulent history in the 20th century. More recently he directed “Ulysses’ Gaze,” which refers to Angelopoulos’ own longing for the innocent vision of the novice and starred Harvey Keitel as a Greek-born American director recharging himself in a journey through the strife-torn Balkans in search of some missing reels shot by the Monikias, real-life pioneer filmmaking brothers.

Angelopoulos is a compact, balding 63-year-old man of deceptively unassuming demeanor. But you quickly discover the quiet yet dominating force of his intellect; it’s easy to imagine how he has willed into existence his shimmeringly beautiful, emotionally wrenching film journeys, which simultaneously cover extensive psychological as well as geographical terrain. Time and again they have led him to be proclaimed as one of the greatest living directors--but also the one of the least known, thanks to the often formidable length and complexity of his films.

That could change with “Eternity and a Day.” It’s perhaps the most accessible of his films and the one that has the biggest chance of reaching the widest distribution in the U.S., thanks to Merchant Ivory, which is releasing it in the spring in association with Artistic License Films.

When you ask the cordial Angelopoulos, seated in his West Hollywood hotel suite--this is his first visit to Los Angeles--the inspiration for “Eternity,” he spins a tale as long and evocative as a sequence from one of his films. The gist of it is that while filming “Ulysses’ Gaze” veteran Italian actor Gian Maria Volonte, cast in a supporting role, died (and was subsequently replaced by Ingmar Bergman favorite Erland Josephsen).

“We were shooting in this little town in northern Greece--Florina,” says Angelopoulos through his rapid-fire translator, Elly Petrides, who does the English subtitles for his films. “We spent the whole day traveling. Gian Maria was happy, singing. It had been quite awhile since he made his last film. He loved being in the film, loved his part. His mood, to me, had the character of a romantic adventure.

“The next morning the hotel chambermaid called me, and I found him dead in his bathtub. Of course it was a shock, but he looked so at peace. I felt I had experienced a privileged moment.”

The Inspiration for ‘Eternity’

From this incident came the inspiration for “Eternity,” in which Ganz’s writer, facing imminent death from cancer, accepts that he must leave the once-magnificent family home on a quay in Thessaloniki and check into a hospital. But the discovery of some letters from his beautiful, long-dead wife triggers memories of his fear that he had been too preoccupied to express fully his love for her. It also ignites a desire in him to have one final perfect day, but one that is transformed with his encounter with a resilient Albanian orphan boy thrust into danger. As in “Ulysses’ Gaze” and other films, their journey, inevitable in an Angelopoulos film, allows the director to comment on current political issues in an indirect manner.

In the writing of the script, Angelopoulos chose for his collaborator the esteemed Tonino Guerra, who has also worked with Federico Fellini and Michelangelo Antonioni. “I didn’t want a collaborator on the actual writing of my script--I write them myself--I wanted a devil’s advocate, as Tonino has been with Fellini and Antonioni. He has the ability to become a chameleon, changing colors according to the director he’s working with. I would describe a scene, I would be pacing up and down, it was like a session with a psychiatrist. Every so often he would stop me and take a note. We must have spoken three hours. Out of this delirium of words, the first draft emerged.”

In the course of making 11 features over the last 18 years, Angelopoulos has worked with such non-Greek stars as the late Marcello Mastroianni (whose failing health prevented him from making “Eternity”), Jeanne Moreau, Keitel and now Ganz. A published writer by the age of 16 and a lifelong movie fan--he can still remember the Expressionist-influenced use of light and shadow as James Cagney was led to the electric chair in “Angels With Dirty Faces” (1938), the first movie he ever saw.

His Journey to Filmmaking

He went to Paris to study film just as the New Wave was breaking. A return visit to Greece led to an unexpected offer to become a newspaper movie critic, which in turn sparked a determination to make movies himself. In short, Angelopoulos became a true cineaste, picking his stars because he had always admired them and wanted to work with them.

Even Angelopoulos, a man of essentially serious temperament, has to smile when he says that he thought of Ganz, a major German star, while seeing him playing Ulysses, of all characters, on the Paris stage. And indeed, Ganz has the dark, expressive eyes, the attractively weathered look and compassionate world-weary expressiveness that Mastroianni brought to so many roles. Unfazed by language barriers, Angelopoulos, who admits to knowing no German, says he was further inspired by the sound of Ganz’s voice, glad he could not understand the words he was saying. (A text in German was prepared for Ganz of identical length to the Greek dialogue subsequently dubbed by a Greek actor).

Angelopoulos says that it took awhile for him and Ganz to get in sync “but that he began to add to my descriptions of the character.” Angelopoulos admits to “great conflicts” at the start with Keitel but that they ended up friends who stay in touch with each other.

To watch an Angelopoulos film is to feel that you are experiencing the essence of Greek culture, flowing effortlessly between past and present, emotional and geographical terrain. “I say to myself that I could have made a career anywhere, but I have chosen to speak in the same words that were spoken by so many who preceded me. Greece is more than a geographical locale to me. It’s a spirit, a culture, and when I’m disgusted with present-day Greece--the loss of spirituality and generosity--I go back to those words said many, many years ago.”

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* “Eternity and a Day” screens tonight at the Annenberg Theater in the Desert Museum, 101 Museum Center Drive, Palm Springs. Angelopoulos will appear with his film. (760) 778-8979.