At the beginning of the film is a two-minute long motion shot. In this long shot, the director used clever scene scheduling and slowly moving cameras to make the picture show a poetic romance. The camera slowly moved from the director and his friend in the film to the blue sailing boat, until the sailing boat disappeared from the frame. It is worth mentioning here that the sailing boat actually appeared in the memories of his friends, but Angelopoulos appeared in the same time and space as the director. Scenes like this will appear many times in this film. . He did not use flashback techniques when performing memories, but returned people in the present time and space to the real historical moments at that time, using a brand new method to present history. There is no Hollywood-style montage here, only European-style beautiful long shots and superb scene scheduling.
Angelopoulos is good at exploring the relationship between time and space. As mentioned above, he used a moving single lens to break the barrier of space, and also broke the linear movement of time, allowing characters to travel freely in different time and space, thus Achieve a more meaningful artistic effect.
Another scene that impressed me in the film was the two-minute still empty shot at the end of the film. The main point is that when the Greek director and his friend’s family were walking on a curfew night with dense fog, they suddenly met a group of soldiers. In the end, his friend’s family died under the guns of the soldiers. At this time, Angelopoulos did not. Use the lens to directly reflect this scene, but stop with the director's perspective in the film. What we can see from the picture is only a piece of whiteness shrouded in fog, and the picture is completely still. The whole process of the murder of his friend's family was performed with off-screen audio. At this time, the audio became the most important element in the performance of this scene. In the quiet and empty square, a gunshot sounded like the bullet flying out of the TV screen and directly into the chest of the audience, which made people feel extremely shocked. This use of space outside the painting not only expands the space, but also creates endless associations, making the film more expressive.
Although music is not as important as his lens for Angelopoulos' films, it is also one of the indispensable elements in his films to a certain extent. The music composed by his old partner Eleni Karaindrou allows us to be moved by the artistic conception rendered by the music even if we do not know the background of the film.
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