Angelopoulos’ Τοπίο στην Ομίχλη (Landscape in the Mist, 1988) meditates on some of the key themes from his larger oeuvre: the repetitions in Greek history, leaving Greece (and staying put), mobility, the courage of children and the fragility of humankind, and God. The key protagonists in the film are two runaway children, the eleven-year-old Voula (Tania Palaiologou), and the five-year-old Alexander (Michalis Zeke), and a young adult Orestes (Stratos Tzortzoglou). Voula bears the name of Angelopoulos’ late sister, producing an emotional proximity and equivalence with the filmmaker that supports an argument I wish to make in this paper, namely that Voula is both protagonist and a critical agent within the thinking body of the film. Voula's screen presence (through the performance of Palaiologou) critiques the film's trajectory even as she presents it. I will suggest, for example, that the rape sequence which is crucial to Angelopoulos’ narrative of maturing in a hard world is only understood by the actress and Orestes, but not by the filmmaker himself. So, when a male critic writes of Voula, now an abused child, as ‘das zur Frau wurde’ (now a woman) (Schütte 1992: 37), he supports the bizarre but not unusual notion that rape is part of sexual maturation, rather than a violent repression of the self which may in fact inhibit sexual maturation and development in the victim.

Alexander is a recurring name in Angelopoulos’ post-1984 work, such as in Ταζίδι στα Κύθηρα (Voyage to Cythera, 1984), in Το Μετέωρο Βήμα του Πελαργού (The Suspended Step of the Stork, 1991), and in Μια Αιωνιότητα και μια Μέρα (Eternity and a Day, 1998). What we may draw from this is perhaps that the Greek boy and the Greek man are not always distinct entities, that in fact the boy is already showing the wisdom of age, whilst the aged are already returning to the insights of childhood. Orestes, is of course himself, the ever-heroic, ever-desired soldier/brother who featured both as adult partisan hero and as silent child in the filmmaker's earlier film-essay on history and performance: Ο Θίασος (The Travelling Players, 1975). He is also a cinematic agent who circles age and time in Angelopoulos’ oeuvre.