In film history, there is one sentence that is for me irrefutably true: the not-filmed criticises that which is filmed. A variant of this assertion can be found in Angelopoulos’ To Βλέμμα του Οδυσσέα (Ulysses’ Gaze, 1995), in which a Greek director (played by Harvey Keitel) comes back from the USA to Europe and goes in search of undeveloped rolls of film by the Manakis brothers from 1905. This film is about the question of tradition, about the contradictions between the past and the present historical moments. Angelopoulos tells a story about Greece while directing his gaze to other countries. Rainer Werner Fassbinder told me once that he really loved American cinema, but that he understood himself primarily as a German filmmaker. It was the issues of his homeland, the conflicts of his origin that he wanted to deal with in his films. Angelopoulos’ last project was to be dedicated to the Greek crisis. He was a patriot of film history; he wanted to tell the history of his country through the medium of film art.

For me, the theme of the Odyssey-film is a fundamental beginning: every ambitious director searches for missing rolls of film. This is an ambition that authors of moving images carry within themselves. We are archaeologists, predators of the past, spinning threads of time through the centuries. Our model is Arachne. A similar principle in literature: the Library of Alexandria burnt down but we refabricate its texts with the novels, plays and poems of today.

Angelopoulos’ technique is the protest. His films are realistic because they refer to a reality in which people try to orientate themselves. This connects them with the wanderings of the Odyssey. The opposite of unfamiliarity is trust: the places around me, the objects in my field of vision, the people that I touch. Trust is a category of intimacy and openness. We are currently witnessing that in many countries around the world: people are losing collective confidence in and sympathy for their governments. Angelopoulos would have accompanied these developments with his own eyes.