Eternity and a Day
"For many years, there was a strong belief the world could and should be changed for the better, and violent means were often used on both sides in the attempt to put down those who tried to bring about these changes. The nature of these changes became evident in those countries that lived for several decades under the communist regime. My generation was severely hurt by this violent conflict. We lived in Greece a civil war that left behind a country in ruins, both material and spiritual" — Theo Angelopoulos(Fainaru , 2001)
In my viewpoint, Angelopoulos wanted to present the influence of the cross-generation legacy of the war and the violent conflict on people in this quote. Angelopoulos thought that the world would be better for sure. He also made efforts by shooting films to present the reality of war. The deep influence of civil war and violent conflict in Southern Europe severely hurt Angelopoulos's generation and generations to come. There are many reflections on his film Eternity and a Day (Angelopoulos, 1998).
Angelopoulos was born in 1935 and he suffered from both World War Two and the civil war in Greece. At that time, the Economy in Greece was in recession, and because of the regime changes and chaos in Greece, people were in wandering and turmoil, which may bring a deep psychological shadow to them even the war passed. This shadow can be shown in the film that the child sees policemen and runs. Angelopoulos presents this in the reflection of the mirror.
Angelopoulos always felt that he was an exile or a stranger even in his own country, and this feeling comes from his own experiences in dangerous situations in Southern Europe (Rappas and Phillis, 2020). But Angelopoulos still believed that the world would be better. The “both sides” in his quote means the party of communists and anti-communists like liberals. According to Fainaru (2001), Angelopoulos said in the interview that his father was arrested and sentenced to death as an anti-communist. Even though Angelopoulos's father later came back to the family, it still deeply influenced him and somehow, he began to write poems, which also influenced his way of making films that show reality more poetically. Like using metaphors to present the turmoil, the poet Dyonysios Solomos, for example,is not only the revolutionary poet who was exiling himself and later coming back to Greece to fight for the revolution, but also Angelopoulos's self-reflection of identity at that situation, which is experiencing self-exile, deciding to write for people, and buying words from others.
Angelopoulos said that the violent conflicts severely injured his generation. But what I see in Eternity and a Day is there are more generations suffering like the young generation. In the scene on the bus, the passengers reflect Alexandro's whole life. Alexandro and the child, one stands at the end of lifespan and one is at the beginning. It is like the cyclical nature of time. The orphan refuging from Albania to Greece gives Alexandro a feeling of his youth that lives without the feeling of belongingness. After their departure, the child is still facing turmoil, just like the young Alexandro.
In the scene that Alexandro sends the child to the border, the corpses on the wall raise the depressive atmosphere.
It's all because of the state of war and turbulent times. Also, Rappas and Phillis (2020) claim that this film also transfers the message that citizens should provide humanitarian aid to refugees especially in European borderlands at that time. Alexandro saves the child by chance , but there are still countless children sold by traffickers to families who lost their children during the war.
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Reference list:
Angelopoulos, T. (1998). Eternity and a Day . [Film]. Retrieved from
https://www.learningmall.cn/mod/mediasite/view.php?id=153396
Fainaru, D. (2001). Theo Angelopoulos Interviews . The US: University Press of Mississippi.
Rappas, IAC, & Phillis, PE (2020). '“Do the right thing”: encounters with undocumented migrants in contemporary European Cinema'. Studies in European Cinema , 17(1) , pp.36-50. https:// doi.org/10.1080/17411548.2018.1498611
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