General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Ulysses' Gaze

Ulysses' Gaze (To Vlemma tou Odyssea, Το Βλέμμα του Οδυσσέα) is a 1995 drama film directed by the Greek filmmaker Theo Angelopoulos, in which a Greek-American filmmaker identified only as "A" travels across the war-torn Balkans in search of three undeveloped film reels shot around 1905 by the Manakis brothers, pioneers of Balkan cinema.¹^•² The film won the Grand Prize of the Jury at the 1995 Cannes Film Festival and was the first Angelopoulos film made outside Greece.³^•⁴

Key fact	Detail
Director and year	Theo Angelopoulos, 1995; his first film made outside Greece³^•⁴
Screenplay	Theo Angelopoulos with Tonino Guerra and Petros Markaris⁵
Lead cast	Harvey Keitel (A), Erland Josephson (film library curator), Maia Morgenstern, Thanassis Vengos (taxi driver), Giorgos Michalakopoulos (Nikos)⁶
Runtime	176 minutes (Cannes and some reviews list 180)³^•¹
Key crew	Cinematography Yorgos Arvanitis; music Eleni Karaindrou⁵
Cannes 1995	Grand Prize of the Jury and FIPRESCI Prize; the Palme d'Or went to Emir Kusturica's Underground³^•⁷
Reception divide	27% Tomatometer (15 reviews) against an 88% audience Popcornmeter on Rotten Tomatoes⁸

Spoilers

Plot and structure

A, a Greek-born filmmaker working in the United States, returns to his native Ptolemaïs in northern Greece to attend a screening of one of his controversial films. His real purpose is the search for three reels of undeveloped film, possibly the very first film made by the Manakis brothers, who crisscrossed the Balkans at the dawn of cinema recording the region's history and customs without regard for national or ethnic divisions.¹^•⁶ The quest is framed as a search for "the pristine gaze of lost innocence," and the reels themselves stand metaphorically for a shared Balkan history.⁶^•⁵

The journey reverses the Homeric model, as Adam Mars-Jones observed in The Independent: while Odysseus was returning home after a war, A's odyssey begins with a homecoming and then moves outward toward the conflicts of the 1990s headlines, from Bucharest to Belgrade and finally Sarajevo.⁹ The route runs from Greece to Albania, Bulgaria, and Romania up to Constanța on the Black Sea, then down the Danube through the former Yugoslavia to the besieged city of Sarajevo, where the film ends.⁶^•¹⁰ Along the way A encounters his own past, the Balkan past, and women he could love, including figures played by Maia Morgenstern.¹

Time compression. The film's opening long take condenses forty years into a single shot: the Manakis assistant Yannakis dies of a heart attack in 1954 while filming a departing ship in Thessaloniki's harbor, and as the assistant walks toward A, the year shifts to 1994, the image moving from black and white to color.¹¹ Critics have treated this device, which Angelopoulos used repeatedly, as a signature way of collapsing past and present into one continuous temporality rather than separating them into tenses.¹²

Production and context

Angelopoulos (born in Athens on 27 April 1935) wrote the screenplay with the Italian screenwriter Tonino Guerra, known for his work with Michelangelo Antonioni, and the Greek crime novelist Petros Markaris.¹³^•¹⁴ The film was a European co-production involving Paradis Films, the Greek Film Centre, and other partners, shot on 35mm in color.³^•⁵ It belongs to what commentators call Angelopoulos's trilogy on borders, following The Suspended Step of the Stork (1991) and preceding Eternity and a Day (1998).⁴^•¹⁵

The film was made in response to the Balkan crises that followed the break-up of Yugoslavia, and Angelopoulos filmed in the very war zones it depicts.¹⁰^•⁷ Its most famous image, a dismantled statue of Lenin from Ukraine transported by barge up the Danube while local inhabitants gather on the canal bank, has been read as foreshadowing the destruction of Lenin statues in Ukraine and as an emblem of post-Cold War Europe's unfinished transition.¹⁶

Style and interpretation

Angelopoulos's long-take style structures the whole film. Geoff Andrew of Time Out described it as "constructed from long elegant takes, and moving fluidly between naturalism and tableaux-like theatricality."⁸ Scholars have connected this approach to Gilles Deleuze's concept of the time-image, reading the film as an open field of questions about perception and representation rather than an illustration of a fixed story.¹⁷

Classical reception is explicit in the title and structure. Arthur J. Pomeroy, a classics scholar at Victoria University of Wellington, argues that the film's recurring epiphanies, including the Lenin statue scene, draw on modern Greek poetry that syncretizes classical and modern Greek religious values, and that Angelopoulos claims continuity between the ancient and modern Greek worlds while expressing nostalgia for a shared Balkan world.¹⁰ Other scholars have read the film against "Balkanism," arguing that its treatment of involuntary memory and historical continuity re-historicizes the Balkans rather than presenting them as a timeless, cyclical space of violence.¹²

Reception

At Cannes in 1995 the film won the Grand Prize of the Jury and the FIPRESCI Prize from international critics.³ Angelopoulos made his displeasure obvious on stage at receiving the second prize, believing he should have won the Palme d'Or, which went to Kusturica's Underground.⁷ Further honors followed, including the European Film Awards' critics' Felix (FIPRESCI) in 1995, a Silver Ribbon for best foreign-language direction from the Italian film journalists' syndicate in 1996, and the Mainichi Film Concours award for best foreign-language film in Japan in 1997.³

Critical opinion has remained divided. Roger Ebert called the film "a numbing bore" and accused Angelopoulos of arrogance toward his audience, while Janet Maslin of The New York Times found the overall effect "genuinely entrancing," and Jonathan Rosenbaum of the Chicago Reader wrote that it "demands at almost every instant to be regarded as a masterpiece" while finding it too full of itself.⁷^•⁸ This split is visible in aggregate ratings: 27% on the critics' Tomatometer against 88% on the audience Popcornmeter, and an IMDb score of 7.6.⁸^•¹⁸ The film's length and slow rhythm are the recurring complaint; its imagery and emotional power the recurring defense.⁸

Angelopoulos died on 24 January 2012 in a traffic accident while filming The Other Sea.¹³

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Drama and biographical films (individual works) › Drama films 1990s › Drama films late 1990s › Released 1995 to 1998

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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