Film
Ulysses' Gaze
Το βλέμμα του Οδυσσέα
A Greek-American film-maker returns to the Balkans in search of three reels of undeveloped film shot by the Manakis brothers at the beginning of the century — the first film ever exposed in the region. The search takes him north through the wreckage of the Yugoslav wars.
About
Angelopoulos went into the 1995 Cannes competition as the favourite and came out with the Grand Prix, which he accepted with visible irritation at not having won the Palme. The film is nearly three hours long, cost more than any Greek production before it, and was shot across Albania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Romania and a Sarajevo still under siege.
Harvey Keitel plays a director known only as A, returning from America to look for three rolls of film exposed by Yannakis and Miltos Manakis around 1905 — the first footage shot anywhere in the Balkans, and never developed. The search is a pretext for a journey up the spine of a disintegrating region, and Angelopoulos stages it in the enormous unbroken takes that are his signature: a border crossing, a river barge carrying a dismantled statue of Lenin, a fog so thick that a city disappears into it. Erland Josephson and Maia Morgenstern appear along the way, and Eleni Karaindrou's score threads the whole thing together.
It divided critics sharply — some found it the summit of his career, others called it grandiose — and it has aged into the former camp. Time placed it on its all-time hundred. What survives is the premise: that the twentieth century in the Balkans might be recoverable through an image nobody has ever seen, and that a director's real subject is always what the camera failed to record.
Top Cast
Harvey Keitel
A
Erland Josephson
Ivo Levy
Maia Morgenstern
Ulysses' Wives
Thanasis Veggos
Taxi Driver
Giorgos Mihalakopoulos
Nikos
Awards, Festivals & Mentions
-
Winner × 2 — Cannes prizes: Grand Prix, FIPRESCI Prize
-
Nominee — European Film Award Best Film
-
Cannes Film Festival 1995 — In Competition
-
Greece's submission for Academy Award Best International Feature (1996)
