Intertwined and iterative as Angelopoulos’ films may be, Ταζίδι στα Κύθηρα (Voyage to Cythera, 1984) occupies a special place in the director's oeuvre. Speaking to the French film critic Michel Ciment shortly after its release, Angelopoulos conceded that Voyage to Cythera was his ‘least Greek’ and his ‘least deep-rooted’ film, insofar as it was intended to express a ‘general illbeing’ (cited in Ciment 1985: 26). Anyone familiar with Greece's tumultuous political history during the twentieth century will find this statement surprising, given the film's central concern (or so it would seem) with the impossible homecoming of an exiled communist Αντάρτης (partisan) after the general amnesty of 1982. Yet on various occasions, Angelopoulos has indicated that he only added the socio-political backdrop to the film in order to distance himself from it, moving away from a representation of the collective history of the Greek people towards a consideration of individual lives. As such, the film proposes to exchange depictions of the social forces animating communities during and over particular historical periods for the cinematic analysis of particular subjects, specific identities and individual constructions.

Although some scholars have continued to situate Voyage to Cythera within an unbroken cycle of collective socio-political histories, it is more commonly accepted that the film constitutes a creative hinge in Angelopoulos’ career – the moment of what could be called an ‘anthropocentric turn’ (Grodent [1985] 2001: 49). After Voyage to Cythera, Angelopoulos’ films became much more personal and individualistic, more focused on intimate subjective dramas than on collective historical tragedies. This re-calibration of creative effort applied as much to the characters in his films as it did to himself, as the director of the films’ characters. Voyage to Cythera is the first of Angelopoulos’ films in which the protagonist is a film director, although the viewer may be involuntarily focused on Old Man Spyros (Manos Katrakis), which somehow suggests that when Angelopoulos places the human being in the centre, it is for this human being to become decentred, estranged, marginalised, alienated. In addition, Voyage to Cythera is the first film in which Angelopoulos named two of his main characters, notably the elderly couple, after his own parents – Spyros and Katerina – and two other characters (the film director's absent brother Nikos, and his ‘film-sister’ Voula) after his own brother and sister.