ULYSSES’ GAZE
AND THE MYTH OF BALKAN HISTORY
MARINOS POURGOURIS
Human time does not turn in a circle; it
runs ahead in a straight line. That is why
man cannot be happy: happiness is the
longing for repetition.
Milan Kundera1
1. Ulysses and Film
Previous attempts to translate James Joyce’s Ulysses into a film have proven to
be disappointing. One may argue that the novel is as resilient to cinematic
representation as the Homeric Odysseus has been to definitive characterizations.
It is not surprising, therefore, that the character of Odysseus, as W. B. Stanford
has clearly illustrated, has often been stripped of those qualities that make him a
“complete all-rounded” character: he appears as a villain in Sophocles and
Virgil, his oratory skills condemn him to Hell in Dante’s Inferno, while in
Tennyson and Cavafy he appears as an un-familial character.2 Although in
Joyce’s Ulysses the Odyssean character is restored to his Homeric complexity,
his appearance in film remains elusive; to borrow a playful phrase from Maria
DiBattista, “by established conventions of Hollywood moviemaking Ulysses is
a ‘reel’ disappointment” (219). It is in this context that Theo Angelopoulos’s
Ulysses’ Gaze (1995) emerges as the most accurate representation of the
Odyssean character in film; or, to rephrase this, if there has ever been an
equivalent of a literary adaptation of the Odyssean character in film, it would be
Angelopoulos’s Ulysses’ Gaze. There is plenty of common ground between
Joyce’s Ulysses and Angelopoulos’s film: both are commentaries on the art of
creation, they are concerned with history and the past, with definitions of
nationhood, topography, and most importantly, they use a similar method in
adopting the myth of Odysseus.
In a 1923 commentary on Joyce’s Ulysses, T.S. Eliot first suggests the term
“mythical method” to describe the relationship between the Homeric subtext
and the novel:
1
In using the myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel between
contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr. Joyce is pursuing a method which others
must pursue after him. […] It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of
giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and
anarchy which is contemporary history. […] Instead of narrative method, we may
now use the mythical method. It is, I seriously believe, a step toward making the
modern world possible for art. (177)
Eliot’s description could be helpful in approaching Angelopoulos’s film as a
historical commentary that appropriates a mythical subtext in order to address
this “immense panorama of futility and anarchy.” This is a method that
Angelopoulos had employed in previous films as well and which, I believe,
reached its epitome in The Traveling Players (1974/5), which unfolds during the
Greek Civil War (1944-49) and uses the myth of Orestes as its subtext.3 The
narrative of Ulysses’ Gaze takes place in the early 1990s, during the Bosnian
conflict, and its geographical focus covers most of the Balkan region (Greece,
Albania, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia and Bosnia). The placement of
the Odyssean character in a time of crisis is, in fact, a theme that permeates
many of his modern reincarnations: Joyce portrays him as a Jew in Ireland
struggling with anti-Semitism, Primo Levi places him in Auschwitz, Derek
Walcott under a fascist regime, and Angelopoulos in the war-torn Balkans. In
essence, the adaptability of the character, his ability to manipulate situations and
overcome crises, posits him within and against the greatest crisis of modernity,
that of contemporary history.
It is precisely this relationship between myth and Balkan history that is the
focus of this paper. As Laurence Coupe has suggested in his book Myth, T.S.
Eliot’s proposal of the mythical method is founded on the question of form: it is
an attempt to respond to history’s vulgar chaos through the structure of classical
convention (45). What makes the mythical form so appealing a subtext in
modernity is its ability to ‘bend’ history and, thus, signify that the historical
event has already happened, albeit in an undefined space and time. It endows
history with “a shape and a significance,” in other words, by placing it within
the parameters of a pre-existing and diachronical text (i.e. a sub-text). In the
Balkan context, such formulization is wrought with controversy as it lies at the
very core of what Maria Todorova calls “Balkanism”: the Western gaze directed
at the Balkans that renders the region as primitive, barbaric, and uncivilized.
Before proceeding to discuss the use and misuse of myth in the context of
Balkan history, I will briefly outline the plot of Ulysses Gaze and establish its
relationship with the Homeric subtext. Apart from Angelopoulos’s film, I will
briefly consider Emir Kustrurica’s Underground since the intense exchange that
followed its release and its awarding of the Palme d’Or at Cannes makes it an
interesting case in point.
2
2. From Florina to Sarajevo:
My Point of Departure was the Odyssey4
2a. Florina, Ithaca, Penelope
Ulysses’ Gaze follows a Greek American filmmaker, A. (Harvey Keitel), in his
search for three lost reels shot by the Manakia brothers at the turn of the
century.5 His journey begins in his hometown of Florina, Greece, to which he
returns after thirty-five years of absence in order to attend the screening of his
most recent film. There, amidst the controversy stirred by his film, he catches a
glimpse of an old love, (Maïa Morgenstern); he follows her as she disappears
between two groups of people facing each other, poised to attack: the
demonstrators and the supporters of the film.
When asked about the Homeric subtext of Ulysses’ Gaze, Angelopoulos
responded that he had appropriated the myth of Odysseus, not the Homeric text:
“according to the myth, Ulysses comes back to Ithaca but does not stay there.
After a while he leaves again on another journey” ( Interviews 94). On the one
hand, Angelopoulos, like Alfred Tennyson, Constantine Cavafy, Dante, and
Nikos Kazantzakis before him, presents us with an Odyssean character that
leaves his homeland behind in the quest of a second journey. On the other,
Angelopoulos’s A. undertakes a journey that closely follows the first: it is a
journey that is repeated, or to recall the film’s closing line, a “story that never
ends.” He will, once more, meet Calypso, Circe, and Nausicaa and, after many
adventures he will find an ‘Ithaca’ in the midst of a conflict.
Already in Homer’s Odyssey Tiresias tells Odysseys in Hades that once he
reaches his homeland, he must undertake a second journey:
But once you have killed those suitors in your halls—
by stealth or in open fight with slashing bronze—
go forth once more, you must…
carry your well-planed oar until you come
to a race of people who know nothing of the sea… (XI: 136-140)
This would be a more personal journey for Odysseus: he must travel inland this
time, as the blind prophet tells him, in order make amends with Poseidon (plant
his oar, make a sacrifice to the god) and die in peace. Indeed, like most of
Angelopoulos’s films, the narrative of Ulysses’ Gaze unfolds inland, in the
mountainous regions of Northern Greece and the Balkans. His quest here is
3
likewise a personal one: as he would later tell Kali (Calypso), he became
obsessed with finding the three lost reels of the Manakia brothers as if they were
his own, as if they enclosed his own lost gaze.6
A.’s return to his homeland is marked, as in the case of Odysseus, by
controversy. The image of Angelopoulos’s Penelope caught between two
opposing sides parallels the tension in the Odyssey between her husband and the
courting suitors. Yet, in the film, A. decides to depart again before the climactic
scene of recognition and reunion with Penelope: “But something holds me back.
I would like to tell you ‘I returned’! But something holds me back” (Το Βλέµµα
130).
2b. Korytsa–Monastir–Skopje–Sophia–Bucharest: Calypso
A. gets into a taxi that takes him to the border between Greece and Albania,
where he helps an old woman by offering her a ride to Korytsa. From there he
heads towards Macedonia to visit the house of the Manakia brothers in Monastir
(today Bitola). Still in Monastir, he goes to the Manakia Museum where he
meets Kali (again, Maïa Morgenstern)—Calypso—and talks to her about the
three lost reels. She is initially suspicious about his intentions and he assures her
that he “is not trying to prove anything” (35).7 They will meet again later on the
train to Skopje. She tells him that all the material is in Skopje except what he is
looking for. The train reaches Skopje, and A. stays on board—the train will now
be heading to Sophia (Bulgaria) and Bucharest (Romania). Kali initially steps
off the train; A. begins to tell a story: he tells her of a summer when he was
looking for place to shoot a film at the island of Delos. He heard a sound and
then saw an old olive tree falling down to the ground. In its roots an ancient bust
of Apollo emerged. At this point, Kali steps on the moving train and A.
continues the story: he attempted to take a Polaroid picture of the image but the
image wasn’t registering. He tried again, with the same negative result:
“Nothing, negative images of the world, as if I had no gaze.”8 He connects this
story with his current quest for the three lost reels: the “lost gaze.”
A customs officer asks to see A.’s passport and orders A. to follow him. The
scene is transferred to Customs Control at the Bulgarian border. A. is in an
interrogation room and he is addressed as Yiannakis Manakis. He is accused of
gun and explosive material possession and is condemned to death on the spot.
He is taken outside to be executed but at the last moment he is pardoned by
King Ferdinand of Bulgaria (a soldier reads the pardon letter). The sentence is
changed to exile at the city of Philippoupolis. A. proceeds to the border control
and shows his passport. He explains that he is going to Philippoupolis and the
guard answers by correcting him: in Bulgarian the name of the city is Plovdiv!
4
He boards the train once more and heads towards Bucharest.
The scene of interrogation introduces us to the first of the two ‘disguises’ or
roles that A. will assume in the film. The theme of disguise is, of course, one of
the most fundamental concepts in Homer’s Odyssey and, perhaps, the most
defining characteristic of Odysseus: he becomes a nobody in front of the
Cyclops, a beggar in front of Penelope and the suitors, and assumes multiple
other roles in order to conceal his identity.9 This first disguise in Ulysses’ Gaze
is presented in the context of A.’s identification with the Manakia brothers: he
becomes Yiannakis Manakis, is condemned to death, and is almost executed.
Later on, A. will similarly assume the persona of the widow’s (Circe’s) dead
husband. In contrast to Homer’s Odysseus, A. seems to be at a loss when these
transformations take place (“I don’t understand” he tells the guards as they are
about to execute him). In both instances, he is not consciously adopting a
persona, as Odysseus does, but rather it is the persona—the object of desire—
that chooses him. Ultimately, this gravitation towards an object of desire
culminates in the quest for the three reels. It is his complete identification with
this object that guides both his journey and his transformations. From a
Lacanian standpoint, the gaze that ‘positions’ him is the Gaze of the object
whose terrible revelation is showed to him only at the film’s conclusion.10
2c. Costanza and the descent to Hades
Exiting the Bucharest train station A. now finds himself in a busy street. A
woman, his mother (Mania Papadimitriou), appears and takes him by the hand:
“We barely made it. Come, we still have six hours to Costanza.” Holding his
mother’s hand, A. regresses to childhood, looks around curiously at the crowds
and a passing parade. The scene is then transferred to the interior of an elegant
house in the Black Sea coast city of Costanza (Romania). It is New Year’s Eve
1945; the war has ended and the prisoners are released from concentration
camps. A.’s father was one of them and the family has gathered at the house to
welcome him back. A. briefly dances with his mother—the scene is reminiscent
of Odysseus’ attempt to embrace his dead mother three times in Hades—and we
suddenly move three years into the future: New Year’s Eve 1948 (the scene,
though, remains the same). The father has now acquired a permit to relocate to
Greece. As they are celebrating, agents from the People’s Confiscation
Committee enter and start taking away the furniture. As the father utters “Happy
1950” the family takes a last picture in the house (without changing either set or
characters, Angelopoulos covers a span of five years). The scene is transferred
to a hotel in modern day Costanza where Kali and A. are sleeping naked on the
bed. A. leaves the hotel and finds himself at the city port. A crane is loading a
5
dismantled statue of Lenin on a boat. They tie it down. In a manner typical of
Angelopoulos, the camera moves slowly around the statue. Kali joins A. at the
port and they part, with A. crying because, he says to her, “I cannot love you.”11
Structurally, both in the Odyssey and Ulysses’ Gaze, the descent to Hades
intercepts another adventure: Odysseus leaves Circe, descends to Hades and
then returns to Circe again. Similarly, A.’s descent (the Constanza episode)
interrupts his encounter with Kali. In both cases the descent to Hades seems to
be a puzzling—if not inconsequential—adventure. The supposed purpose of
Odysseus’ trip to the underworld is, as Circe tells him, to consult the ghost of
Tiresias, who will show him “the way to go, the stages of [his] voyage,/ how
[he] can cross the swarming sea and reach home at last” ( Odyssey X: 594-595).
Yet, it is Circe, not Tiresias, that gives Odysseus a detailed itinerary of his
journey to come and the adventures he will face before reaching Ithaca. The
only exclusive information Tiresias offers concerns the second journey that
Odysseus must undertake to appease Poseidon. At the same time, the trip to
Hades is one of Odysseus’ most significant adventures. It represents an
existential encounter with mortality and a coming to terms with loss; in Hades,
Odysseus will meet his dead mother, his companion Elpenor, veterans of the
Trojan War, Ajax—who had committed suicide because of him, and many
others.
In Ulysses’ Gaze, the trip to Hades is presented as a regression to childhood
which, as in the Odyssey, does not serve the quest at hand (i.e. finding the lost
reels). When Kali asks him about the purpose of his trip to Bucharest (he knew
all along that the Bulgarians had never given the reels to the Romanians) he
mutters, “my steps brought me here.” Upon seeing his mother he expresses the
same surprise as Odysseus does when he unexpectedly encounters his mother
among the dead: “Mother, what are you doing here?” Once in their Constanza
house a series of recognitions unfolds where A., like Odysseus, names the
people of his past one by one: Uncle Vangelis, Aunt Jenny, Uncle Nikos, the
girls (as in Mother, Elpenor, Achilles, Agamemnon, Ajax).
The five-year span that Angelopoulos covers in this episode begins with the
end of World War II and concludes with the departure of the last Greek families
from Constanza. The father has returned from a Nazi concentration camp, in
1945, and from a war that killed millions (Το Βλέµµα 141). He expresses the hope
that a “new world is dawning” but by 1948 he acquires a permit to leave
Romania along with “about 80 Greek families, but also Jews, Armenians….”
(141, 142). By 1950, this dawning new world had proven itself an illusion and
the family is uprooted: “Here, in these lands, in these waters, we lived happily
for a few centuries” (142). Here too, the descent to Hades is a remembrance of
things past and a coming-to-terms with loss: a mourning for lost time, lost
homelands, and beloved people that have now become memories on a faded
6
black and white photograph. This loss at the passing of history will be central in
the sequence that follows A.’s encounter with Kali: in the spectacular scene
where the statue of Lenin is tied onto a boat traveling to Germany to be
delivered to art collectors), people line up on the banks of the river crossing
themselves: a final farewell—a funeral procession—that marks the passing of an
era and a fitting conclusion to the Nekuia.12 It marks, as Angelopoulos puts it,
“the end of a chapter in modern history” (Interviews 146).
In essence, the Hades sequence frames the rise and fall of communism in
Romania which is linked to the massive departure of Greek families from the
country. It begins with the Soviet take-over of Romania and ends with the
failure of the communist experiment and the dismantlement of communist
symbols. Angelopoulos’s masterful irony has Lenin’s statue, subdued and
chained to the barge, literally pointing westwards, his extended hand leading the
way to Germany. In the early 1990’s, after the definitive fall of communism,
Romania was indeed looking to the West and by 1995, the year of the film’s
release, it had submitted its application to join the European Union. If
Odysseus’ descent to the Underworld was a coming-to-terms with his past, this
sequence is a similar confrontation with the traumas of the past: the ghosts of
A.’s childhood, the loss of past homelands and, ultimately, the trauma of
history.
2d. Danube–Belgrade: The Cyclops and the Companion
From the port of Constanza, A. boards a ship that has traveled from Odessa to
Constanza and from there it will follow the Danube towards Germany. At a
checkpoint on the Danube that is controlled by three nations (Bulgaria, Romania
and Serbia) a spotlight shines on the boat and the following dialogue ensues:
Off Voice from checkpoint: “Three-Nations’ border control. Report destination.”
Off Voice from boat: “Destination–Germany.”
Off Voice from checkpoint: “Is there anyone on board?”
Off Voice from boat: “Nobody.” (Το Βλέµµα, 143)
This representation of Authority (the border control) as the faceless Cyclops is
reminiscent of Derek Walcott’s stage version of the Odyssey in which the
Cyclops is depicted as a modern-day dictator—the Eye—that places everything
under the spotlight of the censor (the big Eye is watching you). There is truth, of
course, in the captain’s declaration that “nobody” is on board: the ship carries a
symbol of a lost era (the statue of Lenin) and the nameless A. We should recall a
line here that appears at the beginning of the film. As A. is walking through
Florina, a film is visible in the background and we hear scattered lines taken, in
7
fact, from one of Angelopoulos’s previous films, The Suspended Step of the
Stork (1991): “Our home is your home. Our home…we passed the border and
we are still here. How many borders must we cross to reach home?” The border
becomes what Arnold Van Gennep calls a “liminal” space, an in-between space
within which the individual is stripped of his identity and “wavers between two
worlds” (Rites of Passage 18). It is significant, for example, that A.’s
transformation into Yiannakis Manakis takes place at the border between
Bulgaria and Romania, or that, as he is passing the Greek-Albanian border, we
see immigrants trying to make their way to Greece across the hostile mountains,
many of them standing immobile in the snow. In Angelopoulos’s next film,
Eternity and a Day, the same border motif reappears, at the Greek-Albanian
border, with the image of fixed figures positioned on the fence dividing the two
countries. The arbitrariness of the border is perhaps best captured in another line
from The Suspended Step of the Stork. An army officer on the border between
Turkey and Greece stands on the bridge separating the two countries. He looks
across, lifts his foot “like a stork” and says: “If I take one step…I am
elsewhere…or I die.”13
By dawn the ship reaches Belgrade. An old friend, Nikos (Giorgos
Michalakopoulos)—an embodiment of Odysseus’ companions—is waiting for
A. and runs to embrace him uttering: “The first thing that god made was the
journey”14; A. responds: “then doubt and nostalgia.” They get on a tram and
head towards a nursing home in the city to meet the curator of the Belgrade Film
Archives. In a brief meeting with him they find out that the three reels had been
in his possession but were later sent to a colleague in Sarajevo. Later in the
Journalists’ Club (Nikos is a war correspondent), they remember the past over a
few drinks. They continue the conversation (and the drinking) outside where
they toast to the events and people who marked their youth: Charlie Mingus,
Vasilis Tsitsanis, C.P. Cavafy, Che Guevara, May of 68’, Friedrich Wilhelm
Murnau, Carl Dreyer, Orson Welles, to the three lost reels and finally to Sergei
Eisenstein.15 A. announces that he is going to Sarajevo, and they part.
2e. Philippoupolis/Plovdiv: at the house of Circe
The next scene finds A. sleeping in the ruins of a building. A young woman
(Maïa Morgenstern) wakes him up and together they board a small boat and sail
to her house.16 She is a widow—at some point she sings a dirge for her dead
husband—who indicates that they are near Philippoupolis. We are now
transferred back in time (1915), during World War I, and A. assumes, once
more, the identity of “the other.” He falls asleep and when he awakes he cannot
find his clothes—the widow is washing them at the river. She gives him the
8
clothes of her deceased husband instead.17 He gets dressed and hears a cracking
sound outside: the widow is destroying the boat. Back in the house, they make
love. He soon departs, alone.
We are transposed to the domain of Circe here, the mythical enchantress
who attempts to transform Odysseus into swine. Though Odysseus manages to
overcome Circe’s tricks, with the help of Hermes, he stays with her for a year,
losing himself in lust (sex, food, and wine are abundant on the island of Circe).
Surely enough, Angelopoulos’s Circe sequence includes the transformation of
A. into the widow’s dead husband, a love-making scene and an eating/drinking
scene. At the same time, it is important to point to a ‘doubling’ that
Angelopoulos attempts here. In the Odyssey, it is Nausicaa, in fact, who washes
the clothes by the river and gives Odysseus the garments of her brother,
Laodamas, to cover his nudity in Phaeacia.18 Furthermore, her very name,
“Nausicaa,” means ‘destroyer of ships’ and it points of course, in Angelopoulos,
to the destruction of the boat. A.’s transformation into the widow’s deceased
husband also hints towards Nausicaa’s apparent desire in the Odyssey to find a
husband. Once more, Angelopoulos does not follow the Homeric structure
faithfully, as in the case of Calypso; events that are connected to particular
characters in the Homeric subtext here are mixed-up and attached to other
characters. The effect of these ‘pairings’ (Circe/Nausicaa, Circe/Calypso and,
later, Penelope/Nausicaa) are further heightened by the fact that all four roles
are performed by a single actress, Maïa Morgenstern.19 I will shortly return to a
discussion of these pairings.
2f. Sarajevo: Ithaca again, Nausicaa and back to Penelope.
The off voice of A. begins a monologue: “I was still sleeping when the boat
reached the shore.…” Once in the city, amidst the sound of bombs, A. tries to
stop the people who run in panic, asking them: “Is this Sarajevo?” He finds the
Film Archives and, in the destroyed building, asks a young boy if he knows Ivo
Levi, the archivist (Erland Josephson). He follows the boy who takes him to a
destroyed pub where people have gathered to fill small tanks with water. A.
helps Ivo carry the water to the Film Archive building (bombs are still falling).
Ivo explains that he has the three reels of the Manakia brothers but he has not
found the right chemical formula to develop them. Tired from the journey, A.
lies on a mattress and as he is falling asleep, Ivo narrates, in German, the
following poem into a cassette recorder:
I live my life in widening rings
Which spread over earth and sky.
I may not ever complete the last one
9
but that is what I will try.20
A. wakes up when he hears someone approaching. It is Naomi, the young
daughter of the archivist (Maïa Morgenstern) looking for her father. She asks
him if they had met before as his face looks familiar. When she leaves, A. enters
the room where Ivo is trying to develop the three reels. He discovers that he has
finally managed to find the correct liquid formula—the first samples, the first
images, are now emerging. Ivo returns and, while they are waiting for the film
to develop, they decide to take a stroll. Ivo explains that when the fog descends
on the city it is safe to walk since the snipers from the surrounding hills cannot
see clearly. Together they walk through the city; they see an orchestra of young
Serbs, Croats and Muslims giving a concert, and a theater group performing
Romeo and Juliet in Serbian (the famous Act II, scene 2). Naomi joins them and
asks A. if he would dance with her. The pop music they are dancing to slowly
changes into a more classical and mellow piece: Naomi is now transformed into
the woman from Florina (Penelope); the dialogue of a past separation unfolds
with promises of a reunion (they switch from English to Greek in the middle of
the scene, a sign of recognition). The music slowly returns to up-beat pop and
Penelope becomes Naomi/Nausicaa once again.
A., Ivo, and Naomi are joined by the rest of the family and take a walk by
the river (a young boy with his sister and their parents, as well as their
grandparents). The conversation between the family members shifts between
Yiddish and Serbo-Croatian.21 Suddenly an armed patrol car stops them. Ivo
asks A. to stay behind and runs towards the car. The men are heard to shoot all
the family members one by one: the execution takes place off screen. Protected
by the fog, A. listens to the execution. Devastated, he walks back to the Film
Archives. In the final scene, we see a cinema screen on which a blank film is
projected. A. sits on a chair facing the screen and, in tears, begins the
monologue:
When I return,
It will be with another man’s clothes
Another man’s name
My coming will be unexpected
If you look at me unbelieving, and say “You are not He”
I will show you signs and you will believe me
I will tell you about the lemon tree in your garden
The corner window that lets in the moonlight
And then signs of the body, signs of love
And as we climb, trembling, to our old room
Between one embrace and the next
Between lovers’ calls
I will tell you about the journey all the night long
10
And in all the nights to come, between one embrace and the next
Between lovers’ calls
A whole human adventure
The story that never ends.... (Το Βλέµµα 112)
The camera turns to the blank screen once more and the film reaches its
conclusion.22
Odysseus’ final journey to Ithaca is strangely effortless: while the
Phaeacians take him home on their vessel “an irresistible sleep fell deeply on his
eyes” (289); he sleeps all the way back to Ithaca. Similarly, A. enters Sarajevo
at dawn sleeping in an “ungoverned boat.” Once home he is in disbelief: is this
really Ithaca? When he sees a young shepherd boy, who is in fact a disguised
Athena, he asks, “where on earth am I? what land? who lives here?” (Odyssey,
XIII: 265). In the midst of a Sarajevo bombing, A. would also ask the residents
running for their lives, if he is truly in Sarajevo. And it is a young boy who will
eventually lead the way and take him to Ivo Levi and the three reels. The final
chapters of the Odyssey circulate around three events: the reunion of Odysseus
with his son and wife, the confrontation with the suitors, and the eventual
restoration of order in Ithaca. The final scenes of Ulysses’ Gaze encompass
similar tensions: the brief meeting of A. with Penelope (the woman from
Florina) in the dancing scene, the execution of the family, and the discovery and
development of the three reels. Yet, there is no Athena to appear as a Deus ex
machina and restore peace. The film ends with a devastated A. looking at a
blank screen; the object of desire that guided him through this journey, the three
reels, becomes secondary now. All that is left is the promise of a return, another
journey that will end in an emotional reunion (as the epic does). Once again, this
second journey is hinted to in the Odyssey and it is also a journey whose
objective is to bring about a peaceful end.23
3. “In my end is my beginning”:
The Balkan Myth of the Eternal Return
3a. Mythistoria
We may generally suggest that Angelopoulos’s treatment of both his mythical
and literary subtexts aims towards the construction of a circular frame within
which, to return to Eliot’s definition of the mythical method, “the immense
panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history” is controlled
and ordered. Rilke’s poem that Ivo Levi narrates after meeting A. captures well
11
the film’s tendency towards cyclical repetition: “I live my life in widening
rings.” The film’s opening scene further refers to a line from T.S. Eliot’s “East
Coker” (the second of the Four Quartets) to a similar effect. A. is discussing his
return to Florina with a friend: “I dreamed of coming here at the end of the
journey. Strange. Isn’t it always like this? In the end is my beginning. Florina is
the first stop.”24 As it turns out, Florina will, at least symbolically, be the last
stop as well, inasmuch both Florina and Sarajevo are representative, in the
mythical context, of Ithaca; or as Eliot puts it, again in East Coker, “Home is
where one starts from.” The mythical subtext reiterates an emphatic point: these
events have happened before, at other times. History simply verifies this eternal
recurrence of the events. Angelopoulos covers a period of about ninety years in
which the Balkans witness war after war and people are caught in the clutches
of a brutal history: from the Balkan wars (1912-13), through the two World
Wars, the rise and fall of communism and, eventually, the Bosnian war. The
casting of Maïa Morgenstern for the four central female roles (Penelope,
Calypso, Circe, Nausicaa,) creates the same effect. Each one of her characters
possesses traits of other mythical counterparts: Circe and Penelope both point to
Nausicaa, while Calypso’s parting with A. mirrors his earlier parting with
Penelope. The film makes this pairing most explicit towards the end when, in
Sarajevo, Naomi/Nausicaa tells A., “your face is familiar. As if I have known
you for a long time, almost forever.” Later, when they dance in the fog,
Nausicaa is literally transformed into Penelope and the memory of A.’s parting
with her is replayed: the end of the film brings us back to its beginning.
The use of a circular structure in the film is both far-reaching and, in the
Balkan context, quite divisive. In bending the historical event to fit the cyclical
form of myth, in which events—as in a religious ritual, or a calendar—are
repeated, history is perceived as cyclical or, to revert to the known truism,
history repeats itself. On a more philosophical note, such theorization reveals
the frightening mechanism behind the nausea of the Nietzschean ‘Eternal
Return’: as matter is limited and time is infinite, events are bound to repeat
themselves.
The cyclical outlook of the film, then, is a commentary on Angelopoulos’s
approach to Balkan history. When in an interview he was asked about his
position on Balkan politics his answer pointed in the same direction:
My interest in politics and the Balkans is very easy to explain. Look at the history
of this century and you will notice that its first momentous event took place in
Sarajevo, and now, as we approach the end of the century, we are again in
Sarajevo. This proves to what extent we have failed. (Interviews 100)
Angelopoulos is referring here, of course, to the assassination of Archduke
Franz Ferdinand of Austria, which is widely thought as the triggering event of
12
World War I. Once again, this approach to Balkan history, as I will soon
discuss, treads on dangerous ground. The controversy surrounding Kusturica’s
film Underground is, perhaps, the best example of the tensions inherent in such
mythical approach.
3b. Balkan History: The Cannes of Worms
Maria Todorova has aptly illustrated that imagining the Balkans as a ‘powder
keg’ ready to explode, or as the primitive locus of conflict, belongs to a fantasy
attached to the European gaze directed at the region. In her article “The Balkans:
From Discovery to Invention” she discusses the establishment of a Carnegie
Endowment Commission to investigate the Balkan Wars (1912-13). What is
striking in the launching of the commission is not so much its findings but the
resurfacing and reprinting of the same report during the Yugoslav conflicts of
the early 1990s:
In 1993, instead of launching a fact-finding mission, the Carnegie Endowment
satisfied itself with reprinting the “Report of the International Commission to
Inquire into the Causes and Conduct of the Balkan Wars,” preceding that title
with a gratuitous caption, “The Other Balkan Wars.” Also added is an
introduction by George Kennan, ambassador to the Soviet Union in the 1950s
and to Yugoslavia in the 1960s, best known as the padre padrone of the US
policy of containment vis-à-vis the USSR. Entitled “The Balkan Crises: 1913 and
1993,” this introduction is in turn preceded by a two-page preface by the
president of the Carnegie Endowment, Morton Abramowitz, which recounts his
almost serendipitous idea to reopen the 80-year-old report. […] Abramowitz
considers Kennan the person to best bridge the two events and instruct the
conscience of the international community (which seems to have been tormented
primarily by the Balkans throughout the twentieth century). (457)
In drawing up analogies between the Balkan Wars of 1912-13 and the turmoil of
the early 1990s, the report aspires to confirm that this is the “same Balkan
world” (458). In the same vein as her seminal book Imagining the Balkans,
Todorova continues to explore the Western representations of the Balkans
centering on European attitudes to the region from the early 19th century to the
1990s. She concludes that,
[w]hen the Balkans were part of the scatter pattern of invective aimed at the east
and ‘Orientalism’ was the other necessary for the self-essentializing ‘West’ and
‘Europe,’ there existed the prospect of their rediscovery in a positive fashion.
With the rediscovery of the east and orientalism as independent semantic values,
the Balkans are left in Europe’s thrall, anti-civilization, alter ego, the dark side
13
within. (“From Discovery” 482)
Paradoxically, it is precisely this “dark side within” that Balkan cinema
projected in its own representation of the region in the 1990s; the trend of this
dark and dismal portrayal is, perhaps, best exemplified in Emir Kusturica’s
Underground (1995), Srđan Dragojević’s Pretty Village Pretty Flame (1996),
and Goran Paskaljević’s Cabaret Balkan (1998). The approach to history in the
first two is somewhat similar to Angelopoulos’s Ulysses’ Gaze: the plot moves
back and forth in time attempting to present the recurring moments of violence
or tension in Balkan history.
A brief reference to the controversy surrounding Kusturica’s Underground is
instructive of the discourse surrounding the claim of a cyclical historical
approach to the region. The film was released around the same time as
Angelopoulos’s Ulysses’ Gaze and both films competed for the prestigious
Palme d’ Or at the 1995 Cannes Film Festival. Kusturica’s film went on to win
the award with Angelopoulos ending up as a runner-up and receiving the Grand
Prix.25 On June 2nd 1995, only a few days after the awarding of Underground at
Cannes, French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut published a harsh commentary
in Le Monde under the grand title “L’Imposture Kusturica.” He lamented the
selection of the Film Festival’s Jury and described Kusturica’s film as an
attempt to vilify the victims of Serb aggression against Bosnians. He further
claimed that the film aims to justify Serb atrocities through the lame excuse of
‘self defense.’ Kusturica reacted by publishing a sarcastic response in Le Monde
on October 26, 1995, under the title “Mon Imposture.” He criticizes Finkielkraut
of reaching his unfounded conclusions without having seen the film. Once more,
Finkielkraut responded within a few days with an article in Liberation titled “La
Propagande Onirique d’Emir Kusturica” (October 30, 1995). He admits that he
had not watched the film but, even after seeing it, he stands by his claims
arguing that one did not have to watch Triumph of the Will to know its content.
He further claims that the kind of propaganda Kusturica engages in is “oneiric”:
it represents stereotypical nationalistic views such as the Serbian resistance to
the Nazis or the dream of the united Yugoslavia of the past. As it was widely
reported by news media at the time, the accusations launched against Kusturica
by Finkielkraut, Bernard-Henri Lévy, and many others, led him to briefly
consider retiring from directing films.26
The ‘apple of discord’ in this controversy is historical representation and,
more particularly, the question of whether Kusturica’s film leans towards a
Serbian reading of Yugoslav history. The problem with Finkielkraut’s thesis,
however, is that it falls short of considering the film’s attitude towards political
manipulation. In other words, if Kusturica’s film ‘manipulates’ history to the
service of Serbian nationalism, then it does so in a very paradoxical manner: by
revealing the mechanism of political manipulation itself and by ridiculing the
14
canonization of national heroes by the State. The Master manipulator in the film
is, in fact, a Serbian character, Marko Dren (Miki Manojlović), who perpetuates
the belief that Belgrade is still under Nazi occupation.27 Isn’t such depiction of
manipulation and disillusionment a parody for Tito’s Yugoslavia or Slobodan
Milošević’s subsequent exploitation of political tensions to advance his
nationalistic agenda? It is not surprising that in defending the film, Kusturica
has claimed that it represents “the strongest attack there has been on
Milošević.”28
A more constructive critique of the film—one that is closely related to
Angelopoulos’s use of the mythical subtext in approaching history—comes
from Slavoj Žižek who claims that Kusturica is correct in stating that the film is
not political. “Underground, of course,” he writes, “is multi-layered and
extremely self-reflective” but, at the same time, “it falls into a cynical trap and
presents this obscene ‘Underground’ with a benevolent distance”:
It plays with a mixture of clichés (the Serbian myth of a true man who, even
when the bombs are falling around him, calmly continues his meal). It is full of
references to the history of cinema, to Vigo’s Atalanta, and to cinema as such
(when the “Underground” war hero—who is presumed dead—emerges from his
hiding place, he encounters cineasts shooting a film about his heroic death), as
well as of other forms of postmodern self-referentiality (the recourse to the
perspective of fairy tales: “there was once a land called...”; the passage from
realism to pure fantasy; the idea of the network of Underground tunnels beneath
Europe, one of them leading directly from Berlin to Athens...). All this, of course,
is meant in an ironic way. It is “not to be taken literally” […]. Umberto Eco
recently enumerated the series of features that define the kernel of the fascist
attitude: dogmatic tenacity, the absence of humor, insensibility for rational
argumentation... He couldn’t have been more wrong. Today’s neo-Fascism is
more and more “postmodern,” civilized, playful, and involving ironic selfdistance...yet for all that, no less fascist. (“Ethnic Cleansing” 18)
Žižek places the film in the postmodern discourse that situates the subject at a
distance from the historical event/object or, even, deconstructs it in the context
of “self-referentiality” to such an extent that it becomes completely obscured.
The underlining suggestion here is important: the view of the Balkans as
‘barbaric’ and the approach to the history of the region as one of recurrent
bloody conflicts absolves everyone and everything of responsibility. In other
words, the Balkans are inherently dark, backward, and perpetually immersed in
conflict; the likes of George Papadopoulos, Nicolae Ceauşescu, or Slobodan
Milošević, are seen, in such approach, as products—true sons—of the Balkans,
and their actions are motivated by archetypal tendencies that are to be found in
the region and its people as a whole. At the same time, in this problematic
postmodern tendency Žižek recognizes a fundamental Western fantasy:
15
The predominant cliché about the Balkans is that the Balkan people are caught in
the phantasmatic whirlpool of historical myths […]. What we find here, of
course, is an exemplary case of ‘Balkanism,’ functioning in a similar way to
Edward Said’s concept of ‘Orientalism’: the Balkans as the timeless space onto
which the West projects its phantasmatic content. Together with Milche
Manchevski’s [sic] Before the Rain […] Underground is thus the ultimate
ideological product of Western liberal multiculturalism: what these two films
offer to the Western liberal gaze is precisely what this gaze wants to see in the
Balkan war—the spectacle of a timeless, incomprehensible, mythical cycle of
passions, in contrast to decadent and anaemic Western life. (“Multiculturalism”
11)
On the one hand, the Balkans are ‘fixed’ by the Western gaze which situates
them in the “whirlpool of historical myth.” On the other, it is indeed a peculiar
phenomenon that Balkan filmmakers themselves—like Kusturica, Dragojević,
Paskaljević or Mančevski—choose to situate their films within this gaze. This
tendency is, perhaps, part of that “benevolent distance” Žižek sees in the
postmodern “self-referentiality,” but it is also a tendency towards deconstructing
the trajectory of the Western gaze. If the fantasy of the West is defined by the
projection of Dionysian orgiastic qualities on the Balkans, the question is how
the Balkans imagine the West (and in doing so how they re-construct an image
of themselves). As Vesna Goldsworthy has suggested in Inventing Ruritania:
The Imperialism of the Imagination, the answer might be sought in the
interiorization of Western stereotypes by Balkan people.29 It could also be
located, however, in the relationship between Western hegemony and its
‘subjects’ (be it the Balkans or the Middle East) where the Balkans assume the
role of the barbaric Other as opposed to the ‘civilized,’ and ‘democratic’ West.
The misrecognition in this visual exchange is, of course, its reliance on a
subversive fantasy and its tendency towards idealization (i.e. the ‘good’ West)
and vilification (personified by such representative figures as Slobodan
Milošević).
3c. Ulysses’ Gaze and The Phantasmatic Whirlpool of Historical Myth
The controversy surrounding Underground exemplifies the two central concerns
and misunderstandings in approaching Balkan history. The first is related to the
position that defines the scopic field: i.e. from where is one gazing at the
Balkans and from what distance? The fundamental objection to Kusturica’s film
is that it gazes from afar and is positioned at the same angle that stereotypically
reveals the Balkans as primitive, orgiastic, backwards, etc. This is closely
related to the content of the film: it is not so much that Underground is placed in
16
times of war but, rather, that the characters become caricatures of a primitive
view of the Balkans. The second concern is more closely related to the question
of form: given the phantasmatic projections that define the region, is the
placement of history in a mythical frame an appropriate approach? After all, the
mythical frame invites one to look from a distance (from the past, to be
specific), or, to recall T.S. Eliot’s definition: the mythical method is a means of
ordering modern historical chaos. To state it simply, history is placed in a preexisting mythical frame that renders it ‘visible’ as part of an ever-present
“whirlpool of historical myth.”
Angelopoulos’s characters in Ulysses’ Gaze are not nearly as Dionysian as
those of Underground or Cabaret Balkan. In fact, they are quite Apollonian,
aesthetisized in their pensiveness, their poetic language, and their philosophical
meditations. Yet, this aesthetisization is precisely what places them at a distance
from history—despite the war and the devastation around him, A. is persistently
pursuing the dream of finding the three lost reels that will, somehow, reveal the
first innocent gaze of the Balkans. The use of the mythical form could not be
more fitting. A. moves in and out of the Balkan past, assumes the role of the
widow’s dead husband during World War I, or of Yiannakis Manakis as he is
condemned to death by the Bulgarians, yet his appearance literally remains the
same. Like his own nameless self, historical conflicts are not directly ‘named’ in
the film: they could have existed at any of the many moments of conflict in the
region, from the Balkan Wars to the ongoing Bosnian conflict. The underlining
suggestion is that this region has been in turmoil throughout the twentieth
century—the names, places, and dates are obscure details in this panorama of
futility. For Angelopoulos, it is myth, then, not the conventionally linear
structure of history that captures the drama of the region. In his own words, the
current situation in the Balkans is “a very old story” which can be symbolized,
mythically, in the plight of Sarajevo: “[…]it’s Sarajevo where World War I
began; so while many places have seen as much or more destruction than
Sarajevo, it’s become a symbolic, almost mythic place” ( Interviews 91).
Appropriately, the last image of A. is in a half-destroyed movie theatre in
Sarajevo: the old myth, the old story of the much-suffering man, meets the new
myth of the city that captures the drama of the Balkans.
“Human time,” Milan Kundera writes, “does not turn in a circle; it runs
ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the
longing for repetition.” In a sense, the myth of history’s circularity is also
founded on the basic fantasy of happiness or, at least, if we are to believe Freud,
circuitous repetition is the attempt to work through loss or absence.30 Ulysses’
Gaze ends with A.’s monologue that promises yet another return, thus unveiling
the mechanism and phantasmatic tendency of repetition; next time around, when
he returns, he will get it right: “It will be with another man’s name” and clothes,
17
and, most importantly, he will speak “of the lemon tree in the garden,” and show
“signs of love/[…]/between one embrace and the next.” Repetition in the film is
presented at three levels: the mythical (i.e. the mythical structure and the
Homeric subtext), the historical (i.e. the repetition of Balkan history), and the
personal (i.e. of A.’s return to his homeland, to Penelope, and his childhood).
A.’s attempt at mastering loss—after all, his ultimate aim is to find the three
reels in order to uncover his own lost gaze—ends in failure at all levels: war is
still going on, there are no reunions, no restorations of order; all that remains is
the promise of yet another journey. If we were to compare A.’s position at the
end of the film it would not be with Odysseus but with Camus’s Sisyphus: the
journey has not brought about the end of nostos or his circuitous plight but it has
made him conscious of his position, or more precisely, the scopic field of the
gaze directed on him.
4. Gazing into the Balkan Real[ity]
The final scenes of Ulysses’ Gaze are enveloped in the dense white fog that
covers the city of Sarajevo. This is, perhaps, the most masterful sequence in the
film, centered on the act of gazing. It is here that we encounter the traumatic
kernel of the Lacanian Real: that which cannot be represented, which remains
outside the registers of the Symbolic and the Imaginary and beyond the big
Other that structures reality. Up to this moment—up to the apocalyptic
obstruction of vision—A.’s gaze is focused on a very specific object of desire,
namely the three reels. These reels are connected, as he tells Kali, to his own
lost gaze, and all his mental and emotional energy is cathected on them. It is
important to understand the symbolic significance A. places on the object of his
desire. When he first meets Kali, he tries to convince her that his motivation is
not political; at this point he is still tracing the lost reels in Skopje:
A.: The Manakia brothers went around photographing and filming people. They
were trying to record a new era, a new century. Over sixty years or more they
photographed faces, events, and the turmoil of the Balkans. They weren’t
concerned with politics or racial questions, who were their friends or
enemies. They were interested in people. They were always on the move. All
throughout the declining Ottoman Empire, recording everything…
Kali: …recording everything, landscapes, weddings, local customs, political
changes, village fairs, revolutions, battles, official celebrations, sultans,
kings, prime ministers, bishops, rebels…
A.: …all the ambiguities, the contrasts, the conflicts in this area of the world, are
reflected in their work. (Το Βλέµµα 38)
18
The exchange between them signifies, of course, that they share a common
interest in the Manakia brothers. It also points to the shared understanding that
the Manakia brothers captured the ambiguities, contrasts, and conflicts in the
Balkans.31 As A. sees it, the three lost reels would provide an insight into the
current turmoil in the region: they are the first images, the first vision into the
primordial events that would be repeated many times in the twentieth century.
At the same time, the reels represent something more personal and more
existential for him. Soon after this exchange, he tells Kali of his experience on
the island of Delos—filming on location, he repeatedly attempted to take a
magnificent image of a leaning tree that revealed, hidden in its roots, the bust of
Apollo, but his Polaroid wouldn’t register anything:
Nothing. Blank negative pictures of the world. As if my glance wasn’t working. I
went on taking one photograph after the other. Clicking away. Same empty
squares, black holes…. I felt I was sinking into darkness. (Το Βλέµµα 41)
Then, he finds out about the three lost reels and obsessively immerses himself in
the task of retrieving them:
Three reels of film, not mentioned by any film historian. I don’t know what came
over me then. I felt strangely disturbed. I tried to shrug the feeling away to break
free but I couldn’t. Three reels. Perhaps a whole film undeveloped. The first film,
perhaps. The first glance. A lost glance. A lost innocence. It turned into an
obsession as if it were my own work, my own first glance. Lost long ago. (41)
The fantasy here is that the reels will reveal something personal to A., his own
lost gaze and innocence. Furthermore, they are placed ‘outside’ the official
history and would thus provide a privileged gaze into “this area of the world.”
By the time A. reaches Sarajevo and the three reels, the vision he so eagerly
desires is clouded by the fog. Once again, as on the island of Delos, his gaze
literally falls into emptiness: instead of the reels, the screen simply reveals
“blank negative pictures of the world.” The fog provides a moment of respite
from the war: as long as it lasts, the city is, supposedly, protected from snipers.
It is a moment ‘outside history’ during which ‘normalcy’ returns: what becomes
visible in this fog are the young children—“Serbs, Croats, and Muslims”—that
form a choir together, three funeral processions—Muslim, Catholic and
Orthodox—that meet at the Lion’s cemetery to bury the dead, and A. who is
surprised to realize that he is dancing in Sarajevo: “I must be dreaming. I am
dancing in Sarajevo!” (102, 103). Behind the fog, however, the war still goes on,
hidden from A.s eyes. He eventually, hears the cries of the family as they are
about to be executed, he hears the shots, but he never sees the murders. The fog,
19
described by Ivo Levi as “Man’s best friend in this city,” now becomes the
obstruction. Here A. experiences the full force of the Real. The definitive
knowledge he had projected on the three reels, the absolute Truth he expected
they would yield, now dissolves in the blankness of the fog (here is the skull, the
stain, in Holbein’s painting). The Symbolic order that structured his reality now
collapses in the answer of the real.
Throughout the film, A. struggles to make sense of Balkan history, to
structure reality in a comprehensible way. Yet, his aesthetic distance from the
harsh reality of history and the great significance he projects on the three lost
reels cloud his vision. His defense is to remain distant from what might threaten
his quest and, consequently, his sense of identity: he refrains from reuniting
with Penelope in Florina and he cries because, as he confesses, he cannot love
Kali. Only once the magical formula is discovered, and the reels are about to
yield the vision he so desires to see, does he grant himself a brief respite and
takes a stroll by the river (up to this point rivers were means of attaining the
goal). But what precisely is this revelation that causes the collapse of the
symbolic? It is certainly connected to the conviction that by discovering the
reels he will regain his own gaze; that despite his futile attempts in Delos, his
gaze can still capture reality as it happens. Interestingly, the falling tree in Delos
reveals an ancient bust of Apollo exemplifying both his Apollonian view of the
world—in Nietzsche’s words, “the beautiful illusion of the dream worlds”—and
gravitation towards the classical tradition (Birth of Tragedy 34). It is not
coincidental that many of the stages on his journey lead him to great cities of the
Greek past: Monastir, Costanza, and Philippoupolis (he refers to these cities by
their Greek names). Classical history and mythology hold his vision together but
they also belong to a different reality. As the taxi driver (Thanassis Vengos)
tells him early on in the film, “we [Greeks] made our circle…Three thousand
years amidst broken stones and statues…and we are dying” (Το Βλέµµα 132).
Angelopoulos’s original idea was to give the gaze that reveals the emptiness of
the Real to A. a specific image. The ending was slightly different in this version.
A. would return to the destroyed theatre and connect the developed reels to the
projector. The gaze would then be revealed to him:
A man wearing chlamys is sleeping on the seashore. A cloud, like white
smoke passes over his head. He awakes and stands up. His movements resemble
those of a character in the old, silent, black and white films. He looks around and
mutters something. His mouth moves without sound. Then A.’s voice is heard
saying slowly:
“Where am I? What place? What is this island? What is this city?”
Lines from the Odyssey.
The actor in the short film starts walking, always looking around, as if he has
seen something that moves him. He comes towards the camera and stops at a
20
short distance from it. (109)
The emphasis here is on the collapse of A.’s preconceived notions: like the
Odysseus of the short film, A. is unable to place himself in this devastating
real[ity]. The bombarded Sarajevo is literally and figuratively ‘foreign’ to him.
Angelopoulos’s decision to alter the film’s ending is, in a way, a recognition
that giving this gaze a distinct Classical character would perpetuate his reliance
on the Greek past to structure his understanding of the region.
Contrary to what Žižek and others claim is the case of Kusturica’s
Underground, Angelopoulos’s film does not give the West what it desires
(another view into Balkanism). Although A.’s identity certainly points in that
direction—he is a Greek-American filmmaker who has returned to the region
after many years of absence—his position is defined more by its fluidity than
the rigid understanding of his identity as Greek or American. Like many of
Angelopoulos’s characters he is caught in between identities, and he is defined
by the border. It is no coincidence that his journey always leads him through
Balkan borders and that the symbolic ‘Ithaca,’ his final destination, is Sarajevo,
a divided city under siege. In Angelopoulos’s own words, A.’s journey does not
simply lead to the finding and development of the lost reels, but to “the
discovery of Sarajevo today” (Interviews 98). And when he was asked how he
hoped “to make the rest of the world understand the Balkan situation,” his
answer reflected precisely the necessity to look at the region without
preconceived notions:
I believe that anyone who pretends to have something to say about the Balkans
should, first of all, go on a long, extensive trip through this area, get to know the
people and their particularities, and there are many of them […]. And when the
film speaks about the original innocence of the first look, it does not refer to
cinema only. It is about the necessity in general to see the world once again
without any preconceived ideas, as if for the first time. (98)
In the early 1990s, when Angelopoulos was shooting the film, such “innocent
gaze” was, perhaps, made impossible by the grave reality of war. At the same
time, a call for a renewed gaze at the Balkans did not fare well with Western
audiences and the film never reached wide circulation (despite casting Keitel for
the main role). This, of course, may be partly due to Angelopoulos’s
sophisticated style but it may also lead one to ponder whether this is a gaze that
the West is simply not willing to consider. To recall the concluding lines of C.P.
Cavafy’s renowned poem “Waiting for the Barbarians,”
And now, what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?
They were, those people, a kind of solution. (18-19)
21
What, then, is going to happen to Western identity without the barbaric Other?
The spectacle of the Balkans, what Žižek calls “the spectacle of a timeless,
incomprehensible, mythical cycle of passions” is, for the decadent West, a kind
of solution.
Notes
1
Milan Kundera. The Unbearable Lightness of Being (New York: Harper Collins, 2004)
298.
2
W.B. Stanford. The Ulysses Theme: A Study in the Adaptability of a Traditional Hero
(Dallas: Spring Publications, 1993). The description of Odysseus as a “complete allrounded character” is James Joyce’s.
3
The mythical method was also employed by one of Greece’s most celebrated poets,
George Seferis, who was an acquaintance of T.S. Eliot. Angelopoulos, a poet himself,
often makes reference to Seferis in his interviews and uses lines from his poetry in films.
Ulysses’ Gaze opens with an epigraph from Plato’s Alcibiades: “καί ψυχή εἰ µέλλει
γνώσεσθαι αὑτήν εἰς ψυχήν αὐτῇ βλεπτέον” (and if a soul must know itself, it must look
into a soul). The same epigraph appears in the opening lines of George Seferis’s “Poem
4” of Mythistorima which also uses a mythical subtext (a combination between the myth
of Odysseus and the Argonauts). See George Seferis, Collected Poems (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1995) 6-7.
4
“As I said, my point of departure was the Odyssey. I am referring to the myth, not to
Homer’s text. It is the same myth I used before in Voyage to Cythera” (Angelopoulos,
Interviews 94). Angelopoulos is familiar with the myth of Odysseus and with many of
the post-Homeric versions of the story (Interviews 88). Before writing the script of
Ulysses’ Gaze he visited Tonino Guerra in Northern Italy to discuss the idea with him.
[Guerra is one of the most prolific Italian screenwriters, and has written scripts for many
of Italy’s leading directors: Vittorio de Sica, Federico Fellini, Francesco Rosi, Mario
Monicelli, the Taviani brothers, Michelangelo Antonioni, and others.] Guerra brought an
Italian translation of the Odyssey and was reading it to Angelopoulos when a young girl
entered the room. She was a representative of the Manzu foundation and had brought a
sculpture of Ulysses’ head along with a letter signed by Giacomo Manzu’s daughter. She
presented it as a gift to Angelopoulos adding that “her father’s last wish was to find a
way of sculpting Ulysses’ gaze because he believed this gaze contained the whole human
experience” (Interviews 93). Angelopoulos’s reference to Odysseus and the human
experience echoes Joyce’s statement that “the subject of Ulysses [is] the most human in
22
world literature” Richard Ellmann. James Joyce (New York: Oxford University Press,
1983) 447.
5
As Angelopoulos explains, Yiannakis and Miltiades Manaki (or Manakia) “were two
brothers just like Auguste and Louis Lumière, the first to make films in the Balkans”
(Interviews 94). One is tempted to connect the name of the central character, A., with that
of A(ngelopoulos) himself. When he was asked if there was any relation between his
name and the character, he responded that he simply had to call him something in the
script and he chose the letter “A.”: [it’s] “spiritually autobiographical: it’s about my
ideas, the questions I ask about the Balkans, the cinema, the human condition”
(Interviews 91).
6
Thodoros Angelopoulos. Το Βλέµµα του Οδυσσέα (Athens: Kastaniotis, 1995) 136.
7
The suspicion presumably arises from the conflict between Greece and Macedonia over
the name of the latter post-Yugoslav state. The Greek government objects to the use of
the term “Macedonia” to designate a single nation and prefers either the official
designation “FYROM” (Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia) or, simply, Skopje
(the name of the capital). In the film, A. assures Kali that in searching for these reels he is
not trying to make a political point.
8
Το Βλέµµα 136.
9
He pretends to be a fugitive in Book XIII, a rich man’s son in Book XIV, and Aethon in
Book XIX.
10
I am referring here to Lacan’s concept of the Gaze as it appears in his eleventh
seminar. “In the scopic field,” Lacan writes, “the gaze is outside, I am looked at, that is to
say, I am a picture” (The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis 106). Lacan
offers the example of Holbein’s painting The Ambassadors to explain that this is not
simply the ‘subjective’ gaze of the subject but, rather, the gaze of the scopic field itself.
In the painting, the Ambassadors are depicted gleaming in the assuredness of their status.
When the viewer repositions himself, according to Lacan, he perceives a flat object at the
bottom of the painting: a scull. “This picture” Lacan concludes, “is simply what any
picture is, a trap for the gaze” (89). The trap of the object’s gaze—in the case of the film,
the reels and their content—is the terrible image that will be revealed to A. in Sarajevo: a
blank screen that reflects the futility of his preconceived notions.
11
The specific subtext for this moment of separation is Odysseus’ departure from
Calypso’s island. Odysseus is full of praise for Calypso—Penelope, he says, “falls far
short of you—but he longs “to travel home and see the dawn of [his] return” (Odyssey V:
240-243). The phrase “I am crying because I cannot love you,” according to
Angelopoulos, “is taken from Homer’s Odyssey. Ulysses remained seven years on
Calypso’s island, but he would often go down to the sea and cry.” (Interviews 96).
12
In the original script, Angelopoulos presents this funeral as “the silence of statues and
the silence of history” (Το Βλέµµα 66). In a 1996 interview Angelopoulos described the
origins of this scene: “This episode originated in a real scene I witnessed while they were
dismantling this huge statue to put it on a ship. A small boat with a couple on it was
crossing the harbor of Constanza, the Romanian port on the Black Sea. When the man
noticed the enormous effigy of Lenin, he stood up and looked at it dumbfounded. The
woman put her hand over her eyes and crossed herself. However, let’s not forget, in a
23
manner of speaking this is also a funeral, and in such circumstances it is customary for
people to make the sign of the cross” (Interviews 98).
13
Angelopoulos 10¾ Vol. 2 (Athens: Aigokeros, 2000) 193.
14
“The first thing God made is the long journey” is a line from Seferis’s poem “Stratis
Thalassinos Among the Agapanthi” (Poems 145)
15
I find the reference to Eisenstein interesting in the context of his fascination with
Joyce’s Ulysses. Maria DiBattista writes: “[…] Joyce, who along with Proust and Woolf
was the modern novelist most intent on creating a new narrative syntax through his
experimentations with language and time, entertained the idea of making a movie out of
Ulysses. Despite his reservations about whether Ulysses could be filmed at all, he did not
discourage Stuart Gilbert from attempting a scenario and, more seriously, talked to
Sergei Eisenstein about the prospects of translating Ulysses into film. Eisenstein, whose
own copy of Ulysses was heavily annotated and marked in the manner of a shooting
script, was especially interested in the potential of the interior monologue to make
cinema the first fully expressive and synesthetic art” (228).
16
The particular location of this scene is not given in the film. Angelopoulos cut out a
good number of scenes between A.’s departure from Belgrade and the arrival to this
unnamed location (a total of five scenes). These scenes were filmed in the Serbiancontrolled Vukovar and in the area of Sulina in Romania. The scene in the unnamed
location was also filmed in Sulina.
17
“[The Widow] brings him a change of clothes to wear. The clothes of an other man.
Her husband? A. gets dressed. He feels strangely in the in clothes of the other; but he is
warm” (Angelopoulos, Το Βλέµµα 84).
18
Later, when Odysseus finds himself in the Phaeacian court, Queen Arete recognizes
her son’s clothes and inquires where the stranger had found them. In Yiannis Ritsos’s
poem “At Nausicaa’s House” the clothes become, as in Angelopoulos, an object of
identification: having recognized the clothes of her son on Odysseus, Arete “at once felt
towards him as toward her son.” Yannis Ritsos, Selected Poems: 1938-1988 (Brockport,
New York: Boa Editions, 1989).
19
“[…] the object of [A.’s] affection seems to change four times, but it is always the
same face, one actress playing four roles. The face, the ideal woman that every
adolescent dreams of as his romantic ideal” (Angelopoulos, Interviews 94).
20
This is an unnamed poem from Rainer Maria Rilke’s 1905 collection The Book of
Hours. The second stanza, not narrated by Ivo, reads: “I circle around God, the
primordial tower,/ and I circle ten thousand years long;/ and I don’t know if I’m a falcon,
a storm,/ or an unfinished song.” From Rainer Maria Rilke, Ahead of all Parting: The
Selected Poetry and Prose of Rainer Maria Rilke. Edited and translated by Stephen
Mitchell (New York: The Modern Library, 1995). 5.
21
It is significant that Ivo Levi, one of the most central characters in the film, is Jewish.
Like Joyce’s Bloom, Ivo Levi is posited in-between cultures (much like A. himself).
22
“[…] you will never find the word “End” at the end of my films. As far as I am
concerned, these are chapters of one and the same film that goes on and will never be
finished, for there is never a final word or anything” (Angelopoulos, Interviews 135).
23
The bloody scene of the slaughter of the suitors in the Odyssey has been quite a
problem in modern renditions of the epic. James Joyce avoids the slaughter in Ulysses by
24
simply turning it into the ‘symbolic’ victory of Leopold Bloom who returns to his wife’s
bed. In “Penelope’s Despair,” Yiannis Ritsos identifies with Penelope who is disgusted
by the view of a bloody Odysseus. Derek Walcott presents the most explicit re-writing of
the scene in his Second Odyssey. When Penelope sees the murdered suitors she rejects
the notion of revenge, argues vehemently with her husband, and even protects the maids
from being executed by her husband and son (an event that follows the death of the
suitors in Homer’s epic).
24
Angelopoulos, Το Βλέµµα 14 [my emphasis]. The last line of “East Coker” is “In the
end is my beginning”; the first is “In my beginning is my end.” Angelopoulos’s use of
lines by Eliot, and later George Seferis, is not coincidental. Both poets were fascinated
with the Odyssean subtext and exemplified in their poetry the use of the mythical method
as a means of exploring history.
25
The competition between the two was so intense, in fact, that, as the New York Times
wrote in its coverage of the event, “Mr. Angelopoulos picked up his prize with singularly
bad grace, stating that he had an acceptance speech for the Palme d’ Or but nothing to
say about the award he had won.” Janet Maslin “2 Films on Strife in Balkans Win Top
Prizes at Cannes.” New York Times, May 29, 1995, Page 11. Angelopoulos would
eventually be awarded the Palme d’ Or in 1998 for his film Eternity and a Day.
26
What emerges as equally striking in the criticism against Kusturica is the personal
focus on his national alliances (the fact that he is Bosnian, for example, who purportedly
turned his back on Sarajevo and moved to Belgrade). One of the foremost experts on
Balkan cinema, Dina Iordanova, goes so far as to put forth the claim that he suffers from
what she calls “Riefenstahl syndrome”: “Riefenstahl claimed she did not intend to glorify
the Nazis and only wanted to celebrate beauty, while Kusturica claimed he did not intend
to make propaganda for the Serbs, he just wanted to practice his mastery. The Nazi
regime happened to be there to give Riefenstahl the chance to work, which she believed
to be coincidental and secondary to her work; the Milošević regime just happened to be
there to welcome a Bosnian Muslim of Kusturica’s stature, giving him a supportive
working environment, but Kusturica regarded this as coincidental and secondary to his
work.” Dina Iordanova. “Kusturica’s Underground (1995): Historical Allegory or
Propaganda?” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 19:1 (1999): 76. In the
same article, Iordanova proceeds to cite Žižek’s claim that Kusturica came to represent
for the West an “exemplary case of ‘Balkanism’[…]: “a timeless space onto which the
West projects its phantasmatic content” (80). Thus, she claims, the West embraces him
because he, more or less, confirms Western stereotypes of and projections on the region.
This point is perhaps a sort of a lapsus calami, since in the article from which she cites,
Žižek claims that the film (not Kusturica himself) is a case of ‘Balkanism.’ Such
comparisons and applications are indicative of an attempt to situate the filmmaker, rather
than the film, as the object of ideology. To state the obvious: Riefenstahl’s Triumph of
the Will is a Nazi propaganda film whether she intended it to be so or not; can one make
the same claim with regards to Kusturica’s Underground?
27
Marko keeps a number of citizens locked in a cellar for years by manipulating them
into believing that they are making arms for the anti-Nazi Resistance (with the blessings
of Comrade Tito). He then sells the weapons to make profit. When they emerge from the
underground, Yugoslavia has already been divided. A good example of the State’s
25
canonization of heroism is Petar Popara (Lazar Ristovski) whom Marko turns into a
national hero by sustaining the rumor that he has died fighting the Nazis. Consequently,
poems are written about him, a statue is unveiled to his honor, and a film is being
produced (under the auspices of the State) to memorialize his heroic figure. In a
particularly telling scene, Petar comes face to face with his fictional persona (i.e. the
actor who is playing the role of the national hero Petar Popara) but fails to recognize
himself.
28
Dan Halpren. “The (Mis)Directions of Emir Kusturica.” New York Times Magazine
(May 8, 2005): 22.
29
In an interview with the Greek daily Τα Νέα, Goldsworthy referred to this adoption of
Western stereotypes by Balkan people: “It is important that they have adopted these
views to such an extent, that the negative perception of the Balkans is sometimes more
prominent in the region than it is in the West. For example, during the Yugoslav war we
would hear the expression ‘we will defend Europe against the Balkans.’ The Christian
Serbs protected it from Islam, the Catholic Croats protected it from the barbarian
Orthodox, and so on. Thus, we have this identification with and projection of the view
that Europe is something positive and the Balkans something negative that does not
belong in Europe.” Vesna Goldsworthy. Εδώ Είναι Βαλκάνια, δεν είναι Παίξε-Γέλασε”
[Interview with Natasa Bastea]. Τα Νέα. October 14, 2000.
30
See Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle (New York: W. W. Norton & Company,
1990) 6-7. I am referring here to Freud’s description of his grandson’s “Fort-Da” game.
The child would throw a wooden reel attached to a string until it disappeared exclaiming
“o-o-o-o” (which Freud understands as Fort). He would then gather the reel exclaiming
“da.” Freud interprets this repetition as an attempt to work through the constant
appearance/disappearance of the mother.
31
One is reminded here of the ambassadors self-assured posture in Holbein’s painting I
discuss above.
26