Thea Angelopoulos is still considered one of the greatest Greek filmmakers of all time, and in style, aesthetics and poetics he could be described as one of the spiritual successors of the great Andrei Tarkovsky. One of the most famous examples of his work is “Landscape in the Mist”, a film that was chosen as the best European film in 1988 and for which Angelopoulos won the Silver Lion for directing in Venice. The film is about the journey of two children, 11-year-old Voule and her five-year-old brother Alexandros, who decided to head to Germany because their mother told them that their father now lives there. But “Landscape in the Mist” is actually an allegorical and spiritual drama about a journey, a kind of odyssey of two children through imagination, time, through something intangible.
It is a film of mysticism and atmosphere, and Voula and her younger brother will meet and meet all kinds of people along the way, and it all seems somehow abandoned, neglected, ruined, so “Landscape in the Mist” is a bit on the trail of Tarkovsky’s poetics and style. And this drama is completely hermetic, closed and the film is a stream of consciousness, research of the subconscious, the author’s digging through his own dreams, memories and thoughts. The film is about the passage of time because just like Voula and Alexandros, we are all looking for something through life, traveling from one phase to another, deluding ourselves that we still have time and trying not to think that we have less and less time every day . With “Landscape in the Mis” Angelopoulos, he managed to achieve what is often called visual poetry and transcend poetry into film in a way that only a few have succeeded in doing.
This unusual and poetic drama consists of a series of interesting and unusual episodes, meetings with different people, the arrival of these two children in unusual situations. Angelopoulos came up with the idea for this film after reading an article in the newspaper about two children just heading to Germany to find their father. This idea impressed him so much that he decided to make a film in which the focus is not on the final destination, which in fact does not exist, but only the journey. This strong desire of the children to find their father to decide to embark on such a long journey, but Angelopoulos focused mostly on the inner that he imagined in the children, but also in himself. An episode from his real life and childhood and growing up during World War II, when his father disappeared, also had a big impact on this film. Every day as a nine-year-old he searched for his father’s body among the dead in Athens and this experience had a strong influence on his creativity even though his father survived and after some time was brought back from captivity.
As Roger Ebert wrote, “Landscape in the Mist” is a work of art that comes from feelings, dreams, sadness, everyday moments that we go through constantly in life. It is a film that requires patience and full attention, a contemplative and dreamy achievement located somewhere halfway between dreams and reality, although it is more inclined to dreams, fantasies and instincts. It is one of those films for which it is impossible to answer the dumbest possible question when it comes to film and which of course reads “What is it about?”. The most banal answer would be in that case two children sit on a train to find their father in Germany, but the beauty and value of this and most of Angelopoulos’ other films lies in the journey itself. In the details, in the pictures, in the emotion, in something inner that is hard to describe in words and explain.
