In February 2005, Theo Angelopoulos came to the Cinémathèque in Bergen, which screened a retrospective of his work. During an interview session before Ο Μελισσοκόμος (The Beekeeper, 1986) he said something that has stayed with me: ‘Everything that has existed will always exist. Nothing fades away, nothing dies’. Everything that has existed will always exist. Experiences. Actions. Feelings. Suffering. Love. Ideas. Thoughts. People. The discursive tenor of the director's statement is philosophical, or perhaps poetic, but it seems that it is also embodied by his film aesthetic, which functions to bracket temporality itself. There is the impossible spatial coexistence of objects that belong to different pockets of history, as in Το Bλέμμα του Οδυσσέα (Ulysses’ Gaze, 1995), and there is the strange sense – in many of his illustrious long takes – of the weight of a never-ending present growing so substantial that linearity collapses entirely, time stepping away from itself. If Andrei Tarkovsky is the sculptor of time, Angelopoulos is the sculptor of presence. Originally Angelopoulos conceived what turned out to be his last work as just one film, but he was later – due to the scope of the raw material – persuaded to restructure it as a trilogy. Its third and final instalment, Η Άλλη Θάλασσα (The Other Sea), remained in production when Angelopoulos, crossing a busy road, was hit by a motorcycle near Piraeus in January 2012. The premature death of the auteur is steeped in dark irony, given the fact that it was a speedy vehicle that ended the life of this prominent exponent of slow cinema.

This cinema, it has often been remarked, is also one that is steeped in history. His entire oeuvre seems committed to a deep exploration of the poetics of memory. In Το Λιβάδι που Δακρύζει (The Weeping Meadow, 2004) and Η Σκόνη του Χρόνου (The Dust of Time, 2008), he continues this engagement with the question of the lingering presence of the past, only now this project is reframed in terms of his own statement that ‘what used to be History becomes an echo of history’ (Horton 1997b: 109). The first two chapters of this aborted trilogy concern a Greek woman whose life spans most of the twentieth century.