Theo Angelopoulos

The silence around me
January 2012
by Sens Unic


“All passed by so quickly!
This suspect pain… my stubbornness to want to learn, to want to know, then the darkness, the silence around me, the silence… All made me believe that before the end of winter, with the ethereal silhouettes of the boats, and their sudden breakthroughs in the sky, with the lovers along the promenade, in the declining sun, and the hypocritical promise of the spring, all made me believe that before the end of winter…My only regret, Anna…- but is it only one? -…is not to have finished anything. I left all as a draft, shattered words here and there.” (from Eternity and a day)


Photo: Oleg Tishkovets


“A lot of people don’t have a past. I am personally interested in the ones that have. Besides that, a past is never past. It exists in both the present and the future. When I am making a film, I am trying to build the foundations of something, not to ruin something. Ruin leads to ruin. I cannot feel innocent of what is happening beside me. Civic duty and responsibility is one of the most important characteristics of an artist.” (Theo Angelopoulos interviewed by Olga Markova)

“I am not a missionary. I don’t want to educate people; I try to find a way from chaos to light. We live in confused times where values do not exist any longer. Melancholy goes along with confusion and disorientation….I am equally pessimistic and optimistic about our abilities to find ways out of the confusion of time. But I deeply wish that people would learn to dream again. Nothing is more real than our dreams.” – Theo Angelopoulos, Interviews, 1999

” I am neither a pessimist, nor an optimist. Being an optimist means not to have a very clear view of the facts. Man cannot intervene in a way to make a very significant change in the world. Being a pessimist means to resign, to abandon the possibility, the dream for a better world. Both concepts come to a deadlock. I, personally, do my best to think logically, to see clearly.” (Theo Angelopoulos interviewed by Olga Markova)

“The end of The Dust of Time is the end of a dream. This new film is about the lack of a dream at the moment. I don’t think the problems of the present are necessarily financial problems, but a general lack of values. This new film talks about a closed horizon. As a country, it’s like we’re sitting in a closed waiting room, and we have no idea what’s going to happen when that door is finally opened.” (Theo Angelopoulos in an interview from 2011 for Sight & Sound)

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