Film Review: 'The Gaze of Ulysses'

The Gaze of Ulysses is one of the most important masterpieces of the father of Greek cinema, Theo Angelopoulos, and one of the most obscure, profound and magnificent of all his works. I can no longer describe the shock and surprise I felt when I first saw this film. The scenes and lines in it linger in my mind for a long time and keep coming back, like a source of imagination that contains a myriad of revelatory imagery and inspiration.
In Search of the Lost Good
Ulysses' Gaze, also known as Ulysses' Journey of Life, is a film that focuses on a director's search for three reels of lost film. The three reels of film are the early images taken by the Manaki brothers, the first Balkan filmmakers, and they are the prototype and mother of Greek cinema. Like the early Greek film The Weaver, which is inserted at the beginning of the film, it is a sign of the era in which cinema was born. Now, more than a hundred years later, cinema has come a long way. But in the eyes of the director, cinema has deviated from its original beauty, the simple, pure and heartfelt images, and it has gradually deteriorated into fancy and empty images. The journey to trace the three lost reels of film is a reverse search for the origin of the film. This is the purpose of the journey, not so much a journey as a spiritual experience and return.
The original film is the original beauty of cinema, and the protagonist-director is also on a journey to find the original beauty of cinema and creative inspiration in the chaos of this modern world. On the train, the protagonist once confessed his true feelings: he was caught in a creative dilemma, and the lost films, though simple, were the most rustic roots of cinema, and going in search of them was also the most rustic search for cinema and beauty by the protagonist, or by Anzhe himself. It is also a deep gaze at this era.
A journey across time, history and borders
The whole film is about the protagonist setting out on a long search for film in the Balkans.
Spatially speaking, his journey takes him across the entire Balkan peninsula, from Greece, to Albania, Macedonia, Bulgaria, the Black Sea, the Danube and his ultimate destination, Sarajevo. Throughout the journey, the insights and feelings along the way epitomise the bitter and heavy history of the entire Balkan peninsula. In order to talk about this film, it is necessary to first understand the past and present life of the region in which the film is set.
The Balkans, originally a part of the Ottoman Turkish Empire and located at the crossroads of Asia and Europe, have been a place of multiethnicity and multiculturalism since ancient times. But again, this was not a peaceful confluence, but the front line of warring conflicts, Catholicism, Orthodoxy, Islam ...... Greeks, Albanians, Bulgarians ...... When the Ottomans gradually decayed and disintegrated, the various small ethnic groups in these regions became independent one after another and established their own nation states, which then began to mix with each other. After the rise of communism, many of the countries here became communist, and after the Second World War the iron curtain of the Cold War came down, isolating Greece from its red neighbours. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia was plunged into civil strife and the three nations began to fight each other for independence, the "Bosnian War" broke out and NATO began bombing, which is when Ulysses' journey through life began. The journey through space, the crumbling countryside, the depressed cities, the cold ruins, the hazy mornings and sunsets. All show the traces left by the development of this historical trajectory, while the constantly interspersed fragments of time and memory inserted and traversed map those past tragic histories one by one in this journey, such as the moment of encountering Red Communism, such as the family banquet embracing the mother of 50 years ago.
This is the meaning of the journey in its broadest and grandest sense - a geographical crossing in space, a feeling of the sadness and heaviness of the nation's history.
Chronologically, and spatially, it is intertwined. The passage of the realistic journey is also deliberately interjected by the director with many images of the past, adding historical memories, allowing the protagonist to walk directly into history and memory. He sees Manaki dying on the bay 50 years ago by the river, being taken away by the Communists at the train transit station, embracing his mother in his memory 50 years ago ...... These fragments, big or small, are the memory and history of the nation and of the director personally and even of the protagonist personally. The destiny of people, the destiny of nations, the vertical flow of life and history, the intersection of people and history, this is the journey of life.
In a sense, it is what was said before, Anzhe uses the mouth of the film's main character, the director, to speak out about the despair and loss of film-making in this era, and that to search for the original beauty is to defend the most unpretentious and original values of art. In this search, the protagonist slowly finds hope and inspiration from despair, and rekindles his desire for life and the courage to love.
Finally, the understanding of "Ulysses" is a mythical metaphorical background for the film. Anzhe's films are always about the journey and the ancient allusion to myth. "The journey of Odysseus to his homeland has been repeatedly portrayed in Angel's films, and it takes ten years for Odysseus to return to his homeland. The tragedy of the loss of roots and the intense nostalgia of the people of the Balkans is a realistic sketch of the psychology of the region. When the old woman gets out of the car, the city is no longer the same as she remembers. The contrast between that pale city and the old woman in black is stark. She represents most of the ordinary people who have been displaced in the turmoil, who have long lost their hometowns in the war, and who have returned by chance, only to find that they have long since become outsiders, strangers, because the roots of their hometowns have been severed.
The significance of the multi-layered journey overlaps with each other, creating a rich dimension to the film: it is a recourse to the evolution of cinema from its birth to the present; to the history and past of the Balkans and of Greece; to the director's personal search for inspiration and the sublimation of his soul from crisis. In the end, it all comes back together in the reality of Sarajevo, drawing a heavy rest in the smoke of killing and war. It is difficult to match the magnificence and rhetorical complexity of this work, which is a combination of so many elements in just under three hours.
Travellers of time and memory
This is perhaps the most admirable treatment of time I have seen since Hiroshima no Amor. Unlike the non-linear structure of time, which is no longer new today, Ulysses' Gaze retains the linear passage of time, but makes it mysterious and symbolic.
The Bay: The opening scene in the bay indeed elevates the entire film to an extraordinary grandeur, as Manaki and his assistant film on the beach in the winter of 1954, as a boat slowly sails along the distant sea. The ageing director finally collapses under the weight of life, and this is where the camera slowly moves and we see the protagonist in 1995, who is standing in the same spot, encountering this same scene from 50 years ago. When the camera pans back again, both Manaki and his assistant are gone, but the slow-moving boat on the sea tells us that these two time periods have met here at a crossroads. The experience of a long shot, linking two time periods of 40 years, is indescribable. Two different times meet at the same point in time, where the subjective and objective passage of time has no meaning, it becomes a simultaneous past and present, which is the crystallisation of time, which is eternity. Time does not pass away again, it becomes an eternal memory preserved in its entirety, and this, perhaps, is what allows us to share together the enduring charm of that art, of Manaki's filming and our viewing.
The Black Room: During the journey on the railway, the protagonist is suddenly taken by a group of gendarmes from 50 years ago to a black room, where a man with a verdict in his hand pronounces a series of crimes against him. This is actually the main character's journey sharing the memories of Manaki's early encounters. This is not unlike the previous stories of encounters at different points in time; it is an intervention of reality into memory. Through this intervention, we feel first-hand, through the protagonist, the travails and hardships of a director who lives for his art in troubled times, and the horrors of those times.
The Family Ball: Time and memory meet in the Family Ball sequence. The director finally meets his mother from the past and returns to the home where he once lived. The family begins to hold a ball. One long shot, one ball, "Congratulations 1945!" "Congratulations 1948!" "Congratulations 1950!" The toasts take place one after another. The protagonist here is not only returning to his memories, but also an encounter with a different latitude of time. The two approaches in the bay and in the dark room intersect here. Through such a time-travelling ball in memory, we see history in miniature through the changes of one of the protagonist's families. In it, the father's return home and the search of the house by the People's Committee are all events that took place during Anzhe's own childhood. This section of the ball, too, is strongly autobiographical in nature.
The tumultuous conflict in post-World War II Romania, the sadness and joy and the optimism and strength of people living through their suffering. It is a 20-minute long shot that is consistent to the end, and you will have to experience it for yourself. This scene is also one of the most remarkable aspects of the film.
Lenin in the distance: the backdrop of the changing times
There is no scene more fascinating to me than watching the broken statue of Lenin being dismembered and carried away by the Danube. This scene was borrowed from the much more popular Goodbye Lenin. The statue of Lenin, which once represented the highest beliefs and ideals in communist lands, was dismembered after the illusion of communism was shattered. The god-like spiritual leader can now only be taken away by mechanical hoisting. What a great irony. The scene of Lenin's head beneath the steel wire, silently watching over the small and humble people of the earth, is an intriguing one. Like the giant broken hand in Landscape in the Mist, Lenin is carried away by a ship (not a plane) with his eyes looking away and his finger pointing to the sky, what is he trying to say?
Although man is the writer and maker of history, he is again extremely small and humble, sometimes powerless to change the destiny of the times and the trajectory of history, and can only accept it passively. The Ottomans came, the Christians came, the Fascists came, the Communists came ...... Such is the bitter past of this land, Lenin was slowly transported away like a huge corpse, a funeral for an era that collapsed, and the people on the shore watched this solemnly, bidding farewell and burying another broken era.
Sarajevo in the fog
When, after much threatening, risking his life to arrive in Sarajevo, in the basement of the film's defender, after millions of failed efforts, he finally gets the three reels of the original film, his soul is uplifted and his individuality is purified. It was the steadfastness of this obsession with faith that saved his heart.
However, the sublimation of the individual was not used for this time. The old man's family was still inevitably killed, Sarajevo was still at war, and the world was still deteriorating inexorably. The massacre in the fog is chilling; life is invisible in the misty mist, and in the long white screen we can only hear the distant gunshots and shrieks. Then there are the bodies all over the floor. This unique treatment brings a more intense and lasting psychological impact, an imaginative thrill rather than a low-level visual one. "The present moment in Sarajevo is all that matters", says Anzhe. It is true that in the end, as the protagonist sits in the dark, his eyes full of sorrow, reciting the Homeric Hymns, there is still war outside. At great expense we find the film - which is both the beginning and the end of the story. In the ruins of this broken world, there are still people who hold on to their faith and their original beauty, and just like the three rolls of film, perhaps the beautiful things are only temporarily obscured, but they will surely be eternal, albeit in a trickle, and warm the heart.