Theo Angelopoulos began his film career as a sombre political modernist. His early films offer biting critiques of Greece's past and present, yet always with the distant hope that Greece's future could be prosperous, and that the faults of its recent past could be remedied by a potentially glorious future. The earlier films do have melancholic endings, but in their melancholy the endings are signals or appeals for change: they are attempts to transform melancholy into hope. This outlook soon began to change, and the seeds of a more deep-seated pessimism were sown in Ο Μεγαλέζανδρος (Megalexandros, 1980). Any sense of a worthwhile future that could be built by acknowledging the past came to an end with Ταζίδι στα Κύθηρα (Voyage to Cythera, 1984). There, the past is left behind, but it also seems that nothing more can be learned from it: the past is laid to rest. Here, the past is laid to rest in a way that no longer makes the past the foundation of the future. At the same time, however, because the past is no longer a condition of the future, the future is itself freed from the shackles of the past. With a future that is freed from the shackles of the past, a new kind of optimism finds its way into Angelopoulos’ films.

A clear sense of the transformation in the way the past is envisaged can be gained by way of Angelopoulos’ contrasting use of a nomadic acting troupe, first of all in Ο Θίασος (The Travelling Players, 1975), then by way of their reincarnation in Τοπίο Στην Ομίχλη (Landscape in the Mist, 1988). As Andrew Horton has noted, in the former film, even though a sense of tragedy marks most of the film's events, there is nevertheless a sense of ‘muted triumph’, especially in the troupe's decision near the end of the film to start up again and continue to perform. Here, then, the dead can be remembered and honoured, and the future can be invented by virtue of their memory (Horton 1997: 124). By contrast, when the players ‘return’ in Landscape in the Mist they are ‘used up’ and irrelevant: culture and history no longer matter (Horton 1997: 158).