Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Note on the Text
- Foreword
- Introduction – Angelopoulos and the Lingua Franca of Modernism
- Part I Authorship
- Part II Politics
- Part III Poetics
- Part IV Time
- 15 Angelopoulos and the Time-image
- 16 Memory Under Siege: Archive Fever in Theo Angelopoulos' Ulysses' Gaze
- 17 ‘Nothing Ever Ends’: Angelopoulos and the Image of Duration
- Afterword – Theo Angelopoulos' Unfinished Odyssey: The Other Sea
- Theo Angelopoulos' Filmography
- Notes on Contributors
- Bibliography
- Index
16 - Memory Under Siege: Archive Fever in Theo Angelopoulos' Ulysses' Gaze
from Part IV - Time
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 September 2016
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Note on the Text
- Foreword
- Introduction – Angelopoulos and the Lingua Franca of Modernism
- Part I Authorship
- Part II Politics
- Part III Poetics
- Part IV Time
- 15 Angelopoulos and the Time-image
- 16 Memory Under Siege: Archive Fever in Theo Angelopoulos' Ulysses' Gaze
- 17 ‘Nothing Ever Ends’: Angelopoulos and the Image of Duration
- Afterword – Theo Angelopoulos' Unfinished Odyssey: The Other Sea
- Theo Angelopoulos' Filmography
- Notes on Contributors
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
[I]t is impossible to have peace and normality not because the Balkan peoples could not in principle have much better relations with one another, but because the interests at stake in the Balkans are too great to permit such a development. The way I see it, the roots of the problem go way back in time and all the various conflicts were encouraged, at one time or another. There is a joke I often tell which I heard on my first trip. Before the war a foreign journalist went to Bosnia and was walking about in a town which had a mixed population – i.e. Muslims, Serbs and Croats – and at some point he went where we all go. There was a large public urinal in the centre of the square and he headed towards it, but just as he reached it someone passed him and made the sign of the cross. He stood surprised for a moment, then someone else went by, crossing himself in the Catholic manner but with the same degree of respect before the urinal – and then a Muslim passed, making the analogous Muslim gesture. The journalist asked someone and was told that in the twelfth century there used to be an Orthodox church on this spot. In the fourteenth century it became a mosque and when the Austro-Hungarians arrived it became a Catholic church. Tito, to erase all that, demolished it and built a public urinal.
Theo Angelopoulos (1995: 17)CULTURAL MEMORY AS FLUID ARCHIVE
The joke that Theo Angelopoulos relates in the epigraph above offers a quick gloss on the symbolic economy of cultural memory in Bosnia, the context within which Το Bλέμμα του Οδυσσέα (Ulysses’ Gaze, 1995), the second film in his ‘Trilogy of Borders’, unfolds. Cultural memory in some regions is an officially authorised imperative, but in former Yugoslavia, as the joke suggests, remembering the past is curtailed by a contrary imperative, a state-sanctioned policy to forget the cultural particularities of the ethnic communities cohabiting in the area. The conversion of a sacred space located in the middle of the public square into a urinal points to a dialectical relationship between cultural memory and the state.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cinema of Theo Angelopoulos , pp. 249 - 263Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2015