Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Ulysses' Gaze
1995 · Theo Angelopoulos · Ulysses' Gaze on Sightlines
A stone head the size of a room comes down the Danube on a barge. It is Lenin, dismantled, laid out in pieces, sold west. Along the banks the villagers stop whatever they were doing and cross themselves as he passes. Nobody in the film explains this. The camera does not cut to a face or hurry to the next thing; it holds, and the traveller drifts alongside the beheaded god of the twentieth century at the speed of a river.
Notice what the shot refuses to do. In most films a person sees a situation and does something about it, and the doing changes the situation. Deleuze called that circuit the movement-image; it drives nearly everything we watch. Nothing in the Lenin shot can be acted on. A, the exiled filmmaker played by Harvey Keitel, can only look. Deleuze's name for that figure is the voyant, the seer: a character who has lost the power to intervene and gained, in exchange, the power to see. Angelopoulos casts an American star at his commercial peak, fresh from Reservoir Dogs and Bad Lieutenant, and then asks him mostly to be looked through.
The usual complaint about Angelopoulos is that nothing happens and it takes three hours. Deleuze's answer is that something is happening, and the older grammar had no way to show it. Once action can no longer resolve a situation, time stops being the measure of movement and becomes visible on its own account. You can hear it: long near-silent stretches, wind and distant shelling, Eleni Karaindrou's strings entering as lamentation rather than accompaniment. Nothing advances. A river's worth of time goes past.
His instrument is the plan-sequence, the choreographed long take, shot by Giorgos Arvanitis in anamorphic widescreen and a drained wintry palette. Deleuze described the shot as a mobile section of duration: not a picture of a moment but a slice cut out of change. Angelopoulos puts the change inside the frame. A family's New Year gathering, one room, no cut, and the camera and the shifting tableau carry several years of postwar history and the arrival of a new regime. You do not watch a sequence of years. You watch one turn into the next while nobody leaves the room.
Deleuze has a term for this worth learning: sheets of past. A flashback is dated, labelled then, played, and you are returned. A sheet of past is a layer you can stand on, one that coexists with the present instead of preceding it, so the traveller steps out of one year into a scene from decades earlier with no signalled transition. That is how three hours hold a century without a history lesson. There is an irony in the tool. The unbroken take was Bazin's guarantee of honesty, the refusal to cheat with a cut; Angelopoulos keeps the guarantee and spends it on something impossible, a shot whose continuity certifies a duration that could never have been continuous. It still swears this happened in front of the camera. What it certifies now is time, not fact.
The object of the quest is three reels the Manakis brothers shot at the dawn of Balkan cinema and never developed: an image that exists and has never been seen, latent in the chemistry. Erland Josephson plays the Sarajevo archivist who kept them through the war and finally brings them up. The film calls this the first gaze, a way of looking from before ideology got to it, and the question it leaves open is whether such a gaze ever existed. A man hunts an innocent image from 1905 while a city is shelled around him. Is that recovery, or the most refined available way of not looking at the war in front of you? The film thinks the problem instead of settling it, which is what Deleuze meant by the noosign: a film that thinks instead of illustrating, the screen behaving like a brain.
Then the fog. Mist here conceals and permits at once, and the landscapes it moves through have stopped being settings for action: emptied borders, checkpoints, snow, ruin. Deleuze's term is any-space-whatever, and its purest form is the white field that takes a place's coordinates away. The atrocity at the end happens in that fog, off-screen. Deleuze separates a relative out-of-field, the next room, the thing a pan could reach, from an absolute one, a beyond that cannot be located in space at all. The Sarajevo mist is the second kind, and the film's hardest decision is to put its worst event there, refused as spectacle.
The politics are not incidental to that refusal. Deleuze's phrase for modern political cinema is that the people are missing: a filmmaker can no longer speak on behalf of a unified people, because there is no longer one, and what remains is to tell stories that might invent one. The Balkans of 1995 make that literal, a corridor of new borders where a country came apart into checkpoints. Angelopoulos films the ground as strata, an emptied landscape with a century layered into it and a vanished past speaking over the top of it, and sets against all that the Manakis footage of women weaving, made before any of those nations existed. The film ends in speech: a devastated monologue over the developed image, a piece of testimony delivered to no one.
None of this grammar is his alone, and he was precise about where he got it. The endlessly reframing track across open plains, armies and regimes flowing through a frame that keeps recomposing, is Miklos Jancso's in The Red and the White, where landscape becomes the stage on which power rearranges itself. Angelopoulos made it his own in The Travelling Players, whose single continuous movement across years and regimes is the exact device Ulysses' Gaze carries out of Greece and across a continent. Landscape in the Mist supplied the rest: the border-crossing odyssey, the fog, small figures on a hostile map. There is also a living conduit, the screenwriter Tonino Guerra, who wrote The Passenger for Antonioni, with its seven-minute penultimate long take, and co-wrote Nostalghia for Tarkovsky, whose exiled artist drifting through foreign ruins is the direct template for A. From Tarkovsky's Mirror comes the other device: one actress across time, Terekhova as mother and wife, which becomes Maia Morgenstern's Penelope and Calypso and Circe, so that every woman on the road is the same woman at a different depth of the past.
Forward, the honest thread is short and his own: Eternity and a Day turns this grammar from a continent toward one dying man. The larger claim is about what a long take can be for. Bazin's tradition made it an instrument of realism. Angelopoulos made it an instrument of history, a shot long enough for a regime to change inside it, which means the shot has stopped being the unit of an event and become the unit of an era. That is a new use for the most elementary thing in cinema, and it kept him permanently outside the mainstream, in the festival economy that gave the film the Grand Prix at Cannes in 1995 while the Palme went to Kusturica's carnival version of the same catastrophe.
So watch the edges of the frame, and watch what he does after a figure walks out of it. He holds. He is asking you to keep looking at a place once its story has finished with it, which is the only way a place gets to say what happened there. That holding is the method, and the film practising it is about three reels nobody ever looked at.
Concepts in play
- voyant (the seer) — A (Harvey Keitel) drifts beside the dismantled Lenin floating down the Danube with nothing to do but watch; the dossier notes the film asks Keitel 'to be looked through as much as to act', a vessel for the gaze of the title.
- pure optical and sound situations — Spare, often near-silent sound design in which wind, water and distant war intrude on long stretches of quiet, with Karaindrou's strings entering as lamentation rather than accompaniment; the film is contemplative rather than propulsive.
- the mobile section (plan) — The plan-sequence signature of Arvanitis and Angelopoulos: camera, actors and history choreographed together inside a single unbroken anamorphic take, so change happens within the shot rather than between shots.
- sheets of past (the order of coexistence) — The family New Year's gathering in one room carried across several years of postwar history without a cut, and the traveller stepping out of the present into scenes from decades past within single shots, with no dated flashback framing.
- the Open (the changing whole) — The beheaded Lenin on a barge floated down the Danube toward the West while villagers on the banks cross themselves: one slow river passage in which the whole communist order changes state.
- movement of world — A remains passive and drifting while the statue, the river and the century move past him; movement belongs to the world, not to the protagonist's agency.
- any-space-whatever (emptiness) — Natural fog and mist used as dramatic instrument, snow, and a wintry desaturated palette in which figures are small against water, ruin and white air; landscape stops being a setting for action and becomes pure affective field.
- out-of-field (absolute) — The climactic atrocity happens off-screen in the Sarajevo fog: an event placed beyond the frame in a space that cannot be located or panned to.
- the stratigraphic / archaeological image — The Balkan corridor staged as historical ground: emptied landscapes, borders and ruins treated as a stage with a century layered into them, overlaid with the absent past of the Manakis brothers' 1905 footage and archival texture.
- the people are missing — A journey through Albania, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia and besieged Sarajevo in the immediate wreck of Yugoslavia, a corridor of new borders and checkpoints where no unified people remains; the film's counter-image is women weaving, filmed before any of those nations existed.
- acte de parole (the legending voice) — The film closes on a final devastated monologue spoken over the recovered image, a testimonial voice rather than dramatic dialogue.
- the image of thought — The essayistic, elegiac mode described in the dossier as cinema thinking about its own origins and its complicity in a century of looking, organised around three undeveloped reels as the 'first gaze'.
- temps mort — Editing as punctuation between long durational blocks, duration preserved rather than fragmented, with the 176-minute runtime given over to passage and waiting rather than incident.