Landscape in the Mist (1988, Theo Angelopoulos)

Monday 9th of December, 5pm in the Professor Stuart Hall Building LG02

Join us on Monday the 9th of December from 5pm (film starts at 5:15pm) for a screening of Theo Angelopoulos’s Landscape in the Mist (1988). The film is 2 hours 7 minutes long, so the screening will finish by 7:30pm.

Landscape in the Mist is about a young brother and sister in Athens who run away from home and go on a road trip to try and find their father, who they have never met but are told lives in Germany. The third instalment in Angelopoulos’s ‘trilogy of silence’, the film is often regarded as the auteur’s masterpiece, and one of the greatest Greek films of all time.

In the words of Sight and Sound’s obituary for the filmmaker:

it wasn’t until 1988, with Landscape in the Mist, that the full force of what Angelopoulos was capable of became apparent to world audiences. This epiphany was for many not only the greatest European film of the 1980s but also a redefinition of the art film as an ordeal by sympathy, monolithic visions and effortless metaphoric torque. From the giant statue’s hand rising from the sea to the catatonic huddle on a snow-shrouded highway, any single scene could change your life, or at least what you expect from cinema. A single, lengthy shot of a parked truck, while catastrophically upsetting, might also be the sharpest critique of viewer omnipotence ever created. If you’ve seen it, you’ll remember it forever.

For more, read this 2000 profile of Angelopoulos in Senses of Cinema.