Classical Encounters on Screen: Ancient Greece in Theo Angelopoulos' Final Two Films

Abstract

The modern Greek film director Theo Angelopoulos selectively borrowed plotlines, characters, and motifs from Greek myth, epic, and tragedy and creatively adapted them in his new cinematic works. This article examines Angelopoulos’ final two films, The Weeping Meadow (Το λιβάδι που δακρύζει, 2004) and The Dust of Time (Η Σκόνη του Χρόνου, 2008), through a classical lens to unpick their synthesis of both overt and indirect (‘masked’) receptions. Drawing on developments in Classical Reception, Adaptation Studies, and Media Studies, it unmasks the complex nature of the films’ tangled encounters with the classical past and the challenge they pose to the canonical status of ancient Greece both within the modern Greek state and beyond. Angelopoulos’ oeuvre challenges the viewer and demands that we reevaluate our relationship with the classical past and our own ideological baggage, thus serving as an important corrective to the unthinking acceptance of old certainties and established hierarchies.