THEO ANGELOPOULOS:THE GREEK film director Theo Angelopoulos, who has died aged 76 in a road accident, was an epic poet of the cinema, creating allegories of 20th-century Greek history and politics.
He redefined the slow pan, the long take and tracking shots, of which he was a master. His stately, magisterial style and languidly unfolding narratives require some (ultimately rewarding) effort on the part of the spectator.
“The sequence shot offers, as far as I’m concerned, much more freedom,” he explained. “By refusing to cut in the middle, I invite the spectator to better analyse the image I show him, and to focus, time and again, on the elements that he feels are the most significant in it.”
Angelopoulos was born in Athens, where he studied law. After military service, he went to Paris to attend the Sorbonne but soon dropped out to study at the IDHEC film school (now known as La Femis). Back in Greece, he worked as a film critic for the leftist daily Allagi, which was closed down by the military junta that came to power in 1967. The seven-year regime of "the colonels" was seared into his consciousness and remained a subject throughout his oeuvre.
His elliptical style was born partly out of the restrictive atmosphere of the epoch during which he managed to make his first feature, Reconstruction(1970). Shot in spare, high-contrast black and white, it was about a Greek migrant worker who returns from Germany and is murdered by his wife and her lover.
Angelopoulos emerged on the international scene with his impressive historical triptych, Days of '36(1972), The Travelling Players(1975) and The Hunters(1977), the most ambitious Greek films to date. Shot by Giorgos Arvanitis, the cinematographer on almost all of Angelopoulos's films, they are long, contemplative studies of modern Greek history.
In The Travelling Players, set in 1952, a troupe of actors recall Greek political history and their own personal histories since they last visited the country, in 1939. Nearly four hours long, the film consists of just 131 shots, allowing the audience time to assess the situation rationally.
In Voyage to Cythera(1984), the first of what Angelopoulos called the "trilogy of silence", an old man who fought with the communists during the civil war returns to Greece after more than 30 years' exile in the Soviet Union. The second, The Beekeeper(1986), was the first of Angelopoulos's films to use well-known actors, in this case Marcello Mastroianni as a retired schoolteacher who sets off on a trip around the beehive sites of Greece, picking up a young female hitchhiker on the way.
This compelling film could be called a metaphysical road movie, as could Landscape in the Mist(1988), the third in the sequence and the first of his films to feature children.
Harvey Keitel starred in Ulysses' Gaze(1995) as another character who returns to Greece from exile. The film won the grand jury prize at Cannes. Uncharacteristically, Angelopoulos expressed his disappointment that it did not win the Palme d'Or. He told a shocked audience: "If this is what you have to give me, I have nothing to say," before walking off the stage without even posing for pictures.
Cannes made amends three years later when Eternity and a Day(1998) won the festival's top prize. The film is a philosophical meditation about a dying writer, played by Bruno Ganz, and his thoughts on family, art and mortality.
Angelopoulos's latest film, The Other Sea, was to be about Greece's financial crisis. While filming in Athens' main port, Piraeus, he was struck by a motorcycle as he crossed a road. He died later in hospital.
His wife, Phoebe, and three daughters survive him.
Theodoros Angelopoulos: born April 27th, 1935; died January 24th