To examine the presence and significance of literary references in Theo Angelopoulos’ films, one can start by looking at the influence of antiquity in his work. Since his historical tetralogy – Μέρες του ‘36 (Days of ‘36, 1972), Ο Θίασος (The Travelling Players, 1975) Οι Kυνηγοί (The Hunters, 1977), and Ο Μεγαλ έζανδρος (Megalexandros, 1980) – Angelopoulos’ oeuvre has been imbued with allusions and direct references to classical texts: Greek tragedies at first, The Odyssey throughout his work, and various passages from Plato and Ovid more sporadically. But his interest in the poetic function of language also led him to draw inspiration from modern and contemporary writers known for their references to ancient stories and characters, from Eliot, Joyce and Faulkner, to Seferis and Cavafy. This constant feature in Angelopoulos’ cinema seems to have gained a particular momentum in his later films: Το Bλέμμα του Οδυσσ έα (Ulysses’ Gaze, 1995) and Μια Aιωνιότητα και μια Uέρα (Eternity and a Day, 1998), followed by the trilogy on modern Greece – Το Λιβάδι που Δακρύζει (The Weeping Meadow, 2004), Η Σκόνη του Χρόνου (The Dust of Time, 2008) and Η Άλλη Θάλασσα (The Other Sea, interrupted by Angelopoulos’ death in 2012).

In this chapter I will argue that throughout Angelopoulos’ forty-year long career as a filmmaker, the place and nature of literary references progressively superseded references to other forms of the ancient Greek artistic heritage and contributed to establishing a progressive drive towards a ‘narrative imperative’ in his creative process. This imperative in Angelopoulos’ most recent films consists in subjecting the function and signification of images, mise en scène, even music, to the advancement of the plot, the characterisation of its protagonists and the construction of a diegetic world. Angelopoulos’ turn to a more traditional form of cinema is nonetheless consistent with the inclination towards controversy and polemics he has demonstrated throughout his training and career as a filmmaker. After fighting the Hollywood model of narrative continuity for many years, he seems to have veered away from both a ‘cinema of discourse’, with an explicit political and ideological stance, and a ‘cinema of affects’ as defined by recent film scholarship.