Many of Theo Angelopoulos’ otherwise affectionate critics deride the final film he completed as an artistic failure. In Fredric Jameson's view, Η Σκόνη του Χρόνου (The Dust of Time, 2008) is an unsuccessful attempt ‘to break new ground by transferring the paradigm of discontinuous collective temporalities to the drama of individuals’, doing so in such a way that the historical terrain Angelopoulos once charted so heroically persists only on a distant horizon. The director himself concedes the objective basis of this transformation. He insists that, in his final films, ‘history becomes something of a fresco in the background. Put another way, what used to be History becomes an echo of history’ (Angelopoulos in Horton 1997b: 109). But it is not just the historical content that has diminished into an echo of its earlier soundings. For Angelopoulos, all history is as much a matter of form as it is of content. Leading up to the creation of this final film an extensive mutation took hold of the director's aesthetic, first making itself known in the films from the late 1980s before gradually engineering the evolutionary supersession of the hitherto favoured techniques. By 2008, the Brechtian accent from the 1970s had been thoroughly suppressed, leaving in its place what appeared as the visual eloquence of a generically art-cinematic aestheticism. The dialectic had given way to narrative continuity. The bravura tracking shots and totalising pans had withdrawn into unobtrusive zooms and gently tilting crane shots. The antiheroic and often bourgeois individual had replaced the embattled collective. And, expediting that replacement, the long or medium shot found itself usurped by the Hollywood close-up. It is because of such changes that a cinema of political commitment has been seen to abjure history and embrace sentimental humanism.

These metamorphoses bear all the insignia of what Edward Said once described as ‘late style’, a sensibility that conditions artistic endeavours produced late in one's career or life, and which is usually recognisable in manifestations of contradiction and disavowal. Glossing Theodor Adorno's posthumously published reflections on the ‘third period’ of Beethoven's musical output, Said argues that what we are presented with in those works is ‘a moment when the artist who is fully in command of his medium nevertheless abandons communication with the established social order of which he is a part and achieves a contradictory, alienated relationship with it’ (2006: 8).