The Poetry of Cinema

The world needs cinema now more than ever.
It may be the last important form of resistance
to the deteriorating world in which we live.
In dealing with borders, boundaries, the mixing of languages and cultures today,
to seek a new humanism, a new way.
~ Theo Angelopoulos
 
A faint blue—at times the boundless sky, at times the undulating surge of sea-waves, mist-filled horizons stretching into infinity—and a yellow that sometimes deepens into a reddish hue: a massive ship, a railway carriage, an old house, a boulevard, a cheap restaurant in the city, a bustling street. These few colors float with stoic indifference through Theo Angelopoulos’s parables, in his frames, in his worlds of social life.
 
There is, in color, some secret warmth of relationship. Blue—tranquil and cool—set against yellow—violent, fragmented—projects knowledge at the core of their dialectic. A scientist will tell you: at forty-thousand Kelvin, matter appears blue to the human eye; at only fifty-five hundred, yellow. Thus the paradox: higher temperatures evoke blue, which we perceive as cool; lower as yellow, which we perceive as warm.
 
Angelopoulos threads his celluloid lives through this gradation—from yellow into blue. A long shot might pass from foreground yellow to pale yellow, thence to white, to bluish-white, and finally, to deep blue. Ancient religious texts named yellow the symbol of reassurance and wisdom; blue, of truth, sky, and water. In Christianity, earth is yellow, heaven blue.
 
So far as I have seen, his use of color shapes the entire architecture of his cinema. Color is deeply symbolic. He engages the eye only as much as he releases the ear. Kurosawa once called him the poet of solitude: “His lens silently watches the world.” It is the weight of that silence, the intensity of stillness, that makes his medium so powerful, the viewer unable to break away from the screen.
 
This method is called personal filmmaking. Yet in every film, through the conflicts of personal life, he reflects the crises of the individual and the collective alike. His camera creeps forward at a tortoise’s pace, toward some catastrophic silence—until the viewer’s tension bursts, breaking out into fury and protest.
 
I think of the last scene of Mrinal Sen’s Kharij (The Case Is Closed). When the dead boy’s family carried him for cremation, they crouched in the cremation ground in a posture that seemed innocuous—no hint of explosion, nothing to provoke outrage. But Sen, lacking the resources for a grand scene, instead framed, in two or three shots, political slogans scrawled on the cremation wall. Those words ignited the whole context. The audience’s consciousness rebelled.
 
Theo uses his frozen tableaux in this same way. But unlike Sen’s mobilizing anger, Angelopoulos’s aim is truth itself. It is the difference between Sen’s depiction of poverty—weaponized as Marxist propaganda—and Ray’s poverty, where Apu wages his individual struggle, prepared to resist the system with the light of knowledge. Humanity has never fought for the collective—it has always fought for its private truth. Angelopoulos reframes this truth in wholly new allegory.
 
His films walk the by-lanes of modern life. Along the way, illusions—layer upon layer—settle so densely they appear natural. The audience is lulled into this distorted normality, accepting what is inhuman as part of society’s fabric. Then suddenly, a shock.
 
A man, who has loved a woman with utmost faith, discovers her betrayal. His silent act of shaving off his moustache marks that confrontation with truth. Suddenly, in a kingdom of falsehood, one finds the true face. A collision of dream with reality. The fall from blue heaven into yellow earth.
 
Beneath systemic falsehood, a mask is torn away and the real face emerges.
 
Three unforgettable moments from three films:
 
The Beekeeper (O Melissokomos)—the camera crawls slowly, framing scattered bee-boxes at such angles that the city itself appears a hive of scattered traps. For a moment, the viewer feels ensnared in that very web.
 
The Suspended Step of the Stork (To Meteoro Vima tou Pelargou)—a railway station surrounded by soldiers, trains packed with refugees waiting. A journalist and his crew arrive. Suddenly, a refugee’s body hangs from the ring of a crane. As the hook descends, the alien wail of kin rises; above it, soldiers march away in mechanical indifference. The camera angle here chills the blood.
 
Eternity and a Day (Mia Aioniotita kai Mia Mera)—a vast barbed-wire fence, tall as ten-story buildings, across a snow-covered plain. At varying heights, countless bodies hang, struggling to cross from one land to another. At last, one feels they are not people at all, but frozen clumps of snow.
 
This piercing of emotion is deliberate, militant. A modern echo of Buñuel, whose bullets seemed to fire into the audience itself. The viewer, in the dark hall, must duck for shame. What had been sheltered under falsehood—what the audience had tacitly endorsed—suddenly exposed. The spectator, embarrassed, stands accused by his own belief.
 
Theo delights in striking at the viewer’s conscience. In the midst of narrative, with a sudden image or sound, he turns the arrow of truth upon lived reality. Such artistic retaliation—impossible without the madness of poetry—transforms cinema into poetry itself.
 
Godard, in Jean-Luc Godard par Jean-Luc Godard, declared the “end of cinema” and spoke of a new dimension whose essence was repetition. That the world would have no more cinema, only repetitions. And yet, Angelopoulos proves that within repetition lies immense resonance.
 
Perhaps, as Bernard Shaw admitted nearly a century ago, “What I am telling is nothing new; I am just repeating and representing in a new way.” Perhaps novelty in art is already finished—or perhaps it never existed. What makes art art is not its newness but the intensity with which it strikes human consciousness.
 
And in this vigil, this guardianship of humanity’s oldest truths, the artist appears—in the guise of Theo Angelopoulos. In the dark cinema hall, image and sound converge to reach the bewildered spectator with piercing accuracy.
 
From Greece’s landscapes—its ruins, temples, and history—Theo absorbed every drop of poetry. His country reveres the Father; in his films every character seeks the Father. Father as faith, as ideal. The films are not so much stories as desperate searches for belief.
 
When blue turns to sorrow, yellow becomes violence. These two colors cycle endlessly through his fourteen films. Bare trees amid snow, vast horizons stretching across the frame, desolate wanderers without address, empty theatre seats, and above all—silence. Terrible, fathomless silence.
 
Silence is his greatest poetic gift. His films are so spare of words that one feels cinema has returned to its silent age. Long delayed shots, the slowest of camera movements, the poetry of layered tableaux—while the world rages with the fast cuts of Hollywood and Bollywood, Angelopoulos turned back to neo-realism.
 
Most of his protagonists are middle-aged. His heroines—like Ulysses’ lens—seem one and the same woman, archetypal, imaginary. Into these poetic landscapes his heroes drift silently, walking with slow steps. His themes are private, yet within the individual glimmers the consciousness of the collective.
 
He dramatizes the struggle of human beings against their environment, their time, their pain. The river crossing, the clinging to a crane, are all metaphors of survival. His cinema plays with time and space—until, in his great trilogy (Days of ’36, The Travelling Players, The Hunters), the viewer is denied even the comfort of identifying the protagonist. No sequence of events, no moral certainty. In a single frame, past and present fuse. From the barbed wires of borders emerges the promise of a future of love.
 
For those who love cinema, that promise becomes the gateway to the twenty-first century—an opening to another art-form, born from the imagery of film itself.
 
An art that survives by killing itself. That sheds its old skin only to speak again of life in new ways.
 
Through Theo’s eyes, a new light floods in. Cinema becomes pure poetry.