I’m catching up on the news that Theo Angelopoulos died last week. Hit by a motorcycle. Now that the “last of the European modernists” (as he’s often called) is dead, where does that leave us?
Like kids searching for a father we never knew?
http://youtu.be/EC-AhAYLnOc
(Watch it all here.)
(In case you were wondering where Bela Tarr’s later style came from…)
Or the father they thought they knew:
But never did.
http://youtu.be/NbF7ULeTXs8
(Watch all four clips at once if you can.)
Angelopoulos was perhaps the premier filmmaker of the Event, the crossed-out god whose traces, fragments, ruins, relics leave us perplexed, staring into the yawning gap of His/Her withdrawal.
(Who is “us”, you ask? The ones he leaves wandering.)
that’s as good a working definition of post-modern as I have seen.
what is the figure/measure of authority after paternalism?
Huge loss, but not the last of the great European modernists, unless Godard died and nobody has announced it.
dmf – mm, yes, they are great images for thinking that particular thought. Landscape in the Mist (where the first clip is from) even seems to suggest that the real father is a tree, or The Tree, and that therefore while we’ll never find our real, absent father (/deity), the cycle of life goes on. Its a kind of post-theist nudge toward pantheism. Or maybe pan-atheism.
Joe – You’re right. Godard, I suspect, will live forever.