Europe Endless - The Mediterranean: Landscape in the Mist (Dir Theo Angelopoulos, 2h6m, 1988)

From time to time my imagination is caught by single shots in cinema - shorn from their respective films, they remain powerful, and, at times, revelatory. I found Studio Ghibli through one TV ident in the mid 2000s, I discovered Lawrence of Arabia via its famous well scene, and the specialist lens that introduces Omar Shariff, and Kurosawa's Ran from a single still of the late Tatsuya Nakadai as the beleaguered warlord Hidetora, descending the stairs of a castle that is on fire for real. 

These are a few among countless images, many of which have led me to seek out a film, and from there, often to cover it. For the last few years, the image of a colossal stone hand, slowly rising out of a Greek harbour, has haunted me - appearing three quarters of the way through Theo Angelopoulos's 1988 coming of age tragedy, Landscape in the Mist, it is at once arresting and otherworldly. An early draft of this season, some time ago, would have bookended around thirty years of European cinema between the arrival of a statue of Christ via helicopter to a macrocosm of Roman high society in La Dolce Vita (1960)....and the exit of a genuine antiquity from the sea via the same means 28 years later to a crowd of a teenager and two siblings. The road not travelled. Landscape in the Mist for its part is a perfect window into Greek cinema. 

Like many of the national cinemas we have encountered in the past few months, Greece's truly begins in the 1920s, reaching its golden age in the 1950s; dominated by film noirs, and in the 60s with films like The Red Lanterns (1963), Zorba the Greek (1964), and the Oscar nominated Z (Dir. Costa-Gavras, 1969). Greece's cinematic ambitions only grew with directors like Theo Angelopoulos, Costas Ferris and Costa-Gavras in the 1980s and 1990s, whilst directors like Yannis Economides' grounded violence, and Yorgos Lanthimos' offbeat works have brought the nation's cinema into the 21st century. 

Like many of Angelopoulos' films, Landscape in the Mist considers Greek identity- it, after all, forms the final part of his Trilogy of Silence, all of which could be considered road movies with a focus on the nature of Greece as a nation. This time, the narrative forms around a pair of children Voula (Tania Palaiologou) and Alexandros (Michalis Zeke) looking for their father, who supposedly resides in Germany, their various attempts to catch a train to reach the country, and the people they meet along this journey. 

Against this,  Angelopoulos and his co-writers Tonino Guerra and Thanassis Valtinos essentially dismantle their quest, as it is happening. Not only is the loneliness of their odyssey stark from many of the shots by Giorgos Arvanitis, where his camera tracks the duo down otherwise deserted roads and alone in train stations, but it is one that most of the film's adults seem uncaring when encountering the pair. A scene after the children’s' first removal from the train reveals that there likely is no father waiting for them, and this disillusionment only intensifies as the film progresses. It is a world in which we see the nation from the perspective of its youth, and where its adult characters are either extensions of some greater force trying to stop them reaching Germany, or openly lie to them. Alexandros, looking for food, is not pitied, but remonstrated with by a cafe owner, whilst, in perhaps the film's most unsettling scene, Voula is assaulted by a man giving the children a lift. 

It is easy to consider this a road movie in which every turn seems to indicate that adults are either uncaring or cruel, and their escape becomes all the more important. This echoes in the general malaise depicted at the heart of Greece - as with the previous two films in the trilogy, there is the sense of the nation crumbling; several shots, including the raising of the hand, suggests a Greece being shorn of its very history. Bridging this gap, and appearing midway through the film in the company of a theatre troupe is the teenage figure of Orestis (Stratos Tzortzoglou), who becomes both a protector of the children, and a unexpected guide through the country. The troupe-as-Greece allegory that appears in The Travelling Players (1975) in which Greece's history between the start of the Second World War and the early 1950s is intermeshed with the narrative of Eurpides' Orestes returns here as the group battle their own disintegration to put on plays about Greek history. 

Several times he seems to appear from nowhere to rescue or transport the children onward, and alone among the adult figures in the film he seems to have a genuine care for the duo. Yet, ever here, Orestis eventually "betrays" the childish crush that Voula has on him, despite his attempts to console he. If there is a theme running through the film other than the decay of Greece, it is this sense of disillusionment, of childhood innocence giving way to adult realism. Yet, even in this journey of harsh self-discovery there are moments of wonder, of beauty, and none of them are as striking as the shot that arguably defines the film, a collision of modern and ancient Greece and a search for personal meaning through it.

Rating: Highly Recommended

Landscape in the Mist is available for streaming from Amazon Prime and is not currently available on DVD or BluRay in the UK

Next week, to one of the great nations of cinema, Italia! as we consider Bertolucci's The Conformist