The Beekeeper opens to a static shot of an extended dinner table festively covered with a white tablecloth and ornamented with rose petals that is sitting empty at the center of the courtyard in the rain, as the sound of Spyros’ (Marcello Mastroianni) affectionate voice is heard recounting to his young daughter the natural selection […]
A pensive, middle-aged filmmaker named Alexander (Giulio Brogi, but whose voice was dubbed in Greek by Theo Angelopoulos) on a shooting break from the filming of a semi-autobiographical feature that explores the plight of returning political refugees during the general amnesty of the 1970s, encounters a gaunt, yet ennobled old man selling lavender at a […]
A weary, expressionless acting troupe arrives at a near empty train station in a rural Greek village. The itinerant actors have arrived into town to perform a popular, idyllic, pastoral play entitled Golpho The Shepherdess. The actors seem indistinguishable from each other, and only their literary names, derived from the Aeschylus Oresteia trilogy (Agamemnon, The […]
An off-camera narrator (Theo Angelopoulos) provides the sobering demographics of an ancient village in northern Greece – a population that dwindled from 1,250 people based on a 1939 census to 85 in 1965 – as a passenger bus traverses the remote, mountainous region on an unpaved road and becomes stuck in a water-logged ditch, requiring […]
If the jaded tabloid journalist, Marcello, in Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita ever found success, he would invariably lead the life of Thomas (David Hemmings) in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blowup. In the hip culture of 1960s London, Thomas is a famous fashion photographer whose disillusionment is reflected in his expressionless, mannequin-like models. His technical directions have […]
A beautiful and distracted woman named Giuliana (Monica Vitti) wanders aimlessly through the grimy perimeter streets outside a power generation plant amidst the intermittent chaos of a workers’ strike, accompanied by her young son Valerio (Valerio Bartoleschi). Observing one of the striking workers eating his lunch, she instinctually begins to feel hungry, approaches him, and […]