Alternative Film Guide

To Vlemma tou Odyssea / Ulysses’ Gaze (1995)

Direction: Theo Angelopoulos. Screenplay: Theo Angelopoulos, Tonino Guerra, Petros Markaris, Giorgio Silvagni. Cast: Harvey Keitel, Erland Josephson, Maia Morgenstern

By Dan Schneider of Cosmoetica:

Greek filmmaker Theo Angelopoulos‘ 1995 effort To Vlemma tou Odyssea / Ulysses’ Gaze is the first of that director’s four films that I have seen that is not unequivocally a great work of art. Although there are arguments that can be made in favor of that claim, the film’s 173-minute running time is much too long, especially considering that Ulysses’ Gaze is the least poetic of those four films. (For the record, the others are Landscape in the Mist, Eternity and a D ay, and Trilogy: The Weeping Meadow.)

I’m not saying that Ulysses’ Gaze is a bad film, or that it lacks Angelopoulos’ trademark visual poesy. On the other hand, the film is missing several important narrative elements, while offering poorly scripted scenes and a slow-paced narrative, especially in its last third.

The basic plot follows a nameless exiled Greek-American filmmaker (Harvey Keitel) — referred to as ‘A’ in the DVD credits and in many reviews, though nowhere in the film is the character’s name mentioned — who, after thirty-five years, returns to the Balkans in search of three lost reels of footage from the earliest known extant Greek film, made by the brothers Yannakis and Miltos Manakis in 1905. The directors seem to be near-mythic figures, representing something akin to what D.W. Griffith is to American cinema, even though they were documentarians, logging for decades the travails of the Balkans and the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire in the first half of the twentieth century.

Keitel’s character seems to have personal reasons for making this trip. Several possibilities are hinted at in flashback scenes: in one instance, Keitel simply wanders into his past, while a dream sequence involves the supposed death of one of the brothers. Keitel speaks mostly in English, while most of the other characters speak in Greek or the other local languages. The film does not rely on typical narrative to reveal Keitel’s quest; instead, Angelopoulos uses a barrage of slowly developing images that subsumes the story into an emotional upwelling.

Oftentimes, cinematographers Yorgos Arvanitis and Andreas Sinanos‘ cameras slowly pan ahead of Keitel, then back toward him, or pull away from a "scene," turns 90 or 180 degrees, then swivels back and peers even more deeply at whatever "scene" it had just left. It’s as if the camera is signaling that what seems the same is different, thus pulling the viewer into a closer reckoning of stasis vs. change.

The best such moment takes place when Keitel, in flashback, visits with his mother at his old family home in 1945. There he encounters long dead relatives with whom he converses as "Auld Lang Syne" is played on a piano. Soon afterward, his father returns from the Second World War, and someone mentions it’s 1948. At first, it seems as if there was a typo in the English subtitles of the film. But then someone mentions it’s 1950; Communists arrive and clear out the room of furniture, even the piano. The song stops, and as time moves on the extended family gathers for a photo. Keitel, who has wandered out of frame, is called back by his young and beautiful mother, and although Keitel’s voice answers her (in English, though he is called in Greek) a little Keitel look-alike boy enters frame, and the camera slowly focuses in on him till the scene ends silently.

That scene also probes one of the unspoken mysteries of the Keitel character — his relationship with assorted women, which seems to emanate from a rupture with his mother. Early on in the film, Keitel encounters a Greek film historian with whom he seemingly has an affair. Then, he encounters a war widow (recall, this is the Balkans, mid-1990s), who conflates him with her dead husband; they become lovers.

Finally, he seems to connect with the daughter of Sarajevo’s local film archivist, Ivo Levy (Erland Josephson), who got possession of the three lost reels some years earlier, but could not get the right chemicals to develop them. Yet, like with all the other females, it is not certain how much takes place in the film’s inner reality or within Keitel’s fantasies, for all of Keitel’s female protagonists are played by one actress, Maia Morgenstern, in different guises — even as his mother.

His character’s sexuality is not the only place, however, where such an intermingling takes place. In the first scene of the film (another of those great scenes where the camera goes back and forth along a pier), an old man, who was Yannakis Manakis’ assistant, tells Keitel that one afternoon in Salonika, Manakis had wanted to photograph a blue ship about to sail. We then see the two men, Manakis and the assistant on the pier. Yet, the assistant is the same old man, seen when the film changes from the past’s sepia to the present’s color film. The old man tells Keitel the story merely by walking a few yards toward the actor, as the ship sails off.

Thus, with a few slow, horizontal camera movements, Angelopoulos shows how simple technique can weave a complex tale, with minimal voiceover dialogue from the assistant. This is also an example of great cinematography wherein the actual scenery is rather pedestrian. (How many times have you read a critic praise a film’s cinematography, when all that is done is to let the camera shoot something that is, of itself, beautiful?)

Another example of stellar cinematography comes when a disassembled statue of Vladimir Lenin is placed on a barge and floated down a river. The homage to Federico Fellini’s La Dolce vita, where a statue of Christ, suspended by a helicopter, opens that film (as well as Angelopoulos’ earlier Landscape in the Mist, in which a sculpted hand rises out of a harbor) is clear. However, unlike those previous films, the symbolism in Ulysses’ Gaze is even more powerful, since most of the Balkans were just coming out from under the Iron Curtain’s pall, and Lenin represents a modern Ozymandias, especially with the statue lying on its back, its outstretched pointer finger aimed toward the heavens, with a muted irony that is delicious.

Eventually, after many dreamy sequences, the shooting in Sarajevo ends when mist descends. After Levy discovers the right chemical formula to develop the reels, he and Keitel celebrate with a walk in the mist — Levy is then gunned down. The violence takes place offscreen, and since Keitel does not react, we do not know if this is real, or if the Levy character and the others near him were simply daydreaming that would supply a heroic enough narrative for his quest.

Earlier in the film, a cab driver, who takes Keitel from Greece to Albania, laments the three-thousand-year fall from grace of Greek culture. This viewer is left with the impression that not only is Keitel in search of both the reels and personal redemption of some sort, but also — as the film’s title implies — his own place as a hagiographer of the post-Classical Greek people. Thus his recurring females all looking alike, as if plagued by a goddess of yore, out to seduce and lure him away from his goals.

Nonetheless, when he finally does react after Levy’s murder, Keitel wails. Ulysses’ Gaze ends with his soliloquy of grief. The character’s despair, even though he is now in sole possession of the reels, suggests that his real interest was never the old film footage. How it ties in to his own quest for past memories is uncertain. In fact, there is an air of self-delusion and disingenuity in his grief.

As a performer, Harvey Keitel seems to be dreamily floating throughout much of the film. This approach mostly works, save for a few much too florid speeches. Erland Josephson seems a bit hyperactive as the historian, but is passable, while Maia Morgenstern gives perhaps the film’s best performance — or rather, performances — even if some of the roles seem a bit too far out.

The stellar Australian Madman Films’ DVD package — Region 4 format (Australia / South America, elsewhere you’ll need a region-free player) — is the equal of the best put out by Region 1 distributors like The Criterion Collection, Kino, or Anchor Bay. The picture quality is crisp, clear, and in a 16:9 aspect ratio. Although it lacks an audio commentary, it does have the original theatrical trailer, as well as trailers for other classic films the company distributes. It also has a film gallery, and a very good essay about Ulysses’ Gaze written by film critic and historian Anne Rutherford. Unfortunately, there is no English-dubbed soundtrack, but the subtitles are in a highly readable gold (which should be standard for all subtitles).

Overall, Ulysses’ Gaze is a very good film. It offers a magnificently effective score by Eleni Karaindrou, especially with great viola passages by Kim Kashkashian, which seem almost organically part of Angelopoulos’ visuals. (Angelopoulos’ film scores are perhaps the only ones that are the equal of the great Werner Herzog’s films.)

The film’s main flaws, however, lie in the screenplay. Though penned by Angelopoulos, Giorgio Silvagni, Petros Markaris, and longtime Fellini and Angelopoulos collaborator Tonino Guerra, Ulysses’ Gaze goes on a good 40 or so minutes too long. Some trimming of more pedestrian scenes by editor Yannis Tsitsopoulos and some neat Yasujiro Ozu-like elisions (which Angelopoulos makes expert use of in other films), and Ulysses’ Gaze would have been a great film — even if just shy of a masterpiece due to bits of overacting and soliloquies tinged lavender in their prose (e.g., ‘If I should but stretch out my hand I will touch you and time will be whole again,’ Keitel says at one point).

Ulysses’ Gaze received the Jury’s Grand Prix (that’s the runner-up prize) and the International Federation of Journalists’ award (tied with Land and Freedom) at the 1995 Cannes Film Festival, but it has taken a beating from some critics. In this country, the most virulent review came from none other than that noted lover of Spielbergian tripe, Roger Ebert, who among other things, wrote:

"What’s left after Ulysses’ Gaze is the impression of a film made by a director so impressed with the gravity and importance of his theme that he wants to weed out any moviegoers seeking interest, grace, humor, or involvement….It is an old fact about the cinema — known perhaps even to those pioneers who made the ancient footage A is seeking — that a film does not exist unless there is an audience between the projector and the screen. A director, having chosen to work in a mass medium, has a certain duty to that audience. I do not ask that he make it laugh or cry, or even that he entertain it, but he must at least not insult its good will by giving it so little to repay its patience. What arrogance and self-importance this film reveals."

Would that Ebert was so assertive about the vomit that the many Hollywood schlockmeisters he praises put out. Yes, Ulysses’ Gaze is not a laugh riot, but there are some humorous moments, such as Keitel’s interactions with an old Albanian woman with whom he shares a Greek cab.

As for grace, interest, and involvement? Well, it’s there, even if it requires a bit of intellectual cogitation on the part of the viewer, something that most Americans (and American critics) are unwilling to give. This is best illustrated by an anecdote Keitel’s character tells, of taking a Polaroid shot of an olive tree that, as he watches the negative develop, reveals that the tree was not really there. Yet, we never see this anecdote’s stunning imagery play out; it’s only related via words — or the imagination — being therefore all the more effective (in the manner of a great film such as My Dinner with Andre).

Would that more people had that quality which Angelopoulos so clearly owns; for then even flawed but excellent films like Ulysses’ Gaze would get their proper due.

© Dan Schneider

Note: The views expressed in this article are those of Mr. Schneider, and they may not reflect the views of the Alternative Film Guide.

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