A time with no dimensions
Basque Spanish sculptor Eduardo Chillida compared the instant with the
geometric point. The idea is that a point in space has no
dimensions, so you cannot measure it, not because it has neither wide nor
long, nor thickness or volume. The same goes for an instant. How
long is an instant?. Space and time are two of the dimensions we
perceive through our vital consciousness, however, we cannot measure
their minimum two expressions: the point and the instant. This
contradiction, Chillida said, is linked to the concept of eternity,
since neither has it any dimension, so instant and eternity concepts
could be perfectly matched. An instant is eternal as a
point is unlimited.
My first
experience with the films of Greek director Theo Angelopoulos was with Eternity and a day (Mia mia kai mere aiwniothta, 1998) and his recent death in tragic circumstances brought me back to
that starting point, always eternal. Thódoros Angelópoulos was born in Athens
in 1935 and became a landmark of European cinema of the last fifty years,
especially from the seventies with the film The
Travelling Players (O Thiassos,
1975). His work made the slow filming, often devoid of sound, a visual poetry
exercise, but also movies of social and political criticism. Titles such as Landscape in the mist (Topio stin Omichli, 1988) or Ulysses' Gaze (To Vlemma tou Odyssea, 1995) are clear examples of the two aspects
of his creativity, the first political and the second metaphorical and
symbolic. He achieved the Palme d’Or at Cannes Film Festival in 1998 with the
movie with which I discovered him and now he was working on the third film of a
trilogy about Greek history. The other
sea was thought to discuss the economic crisis in Greece but a policeman
ended his life at age 76 when his motorcycle knocked him down while he was
crossing a street in the neighborhood of Kératsini in Athens.
He was also a victim
of the military coup in Greece in 1967 when they closed the newspaper where he
worked as a film critic after abandoning his legal career and getting a degree
in literature in Paris. He worked as a journalist until the military prevented
him from doing so. Then he turned to film and carved out a very personal career
that appears as a dimensionless point in film history, an everlasting and unhurried
point, a critical and poetic call to wake us from the resignation.
EXHIBITION THE DUST OF TIME click here
THEO ANGELOPOULOS VIDEOS click here
Text by Juan Carlos Romero
Photo courtesy of Intermedio. All rights reserved