Untitled Document

December 18, 2006

December 11, 2006

December 10, 2006

June 3, 10, 17, 18, 24, and 25, 2006

Film Series and Tribute to Greek Film Director: Theo Angelopoulos: Myth and History
At the National Gallery of Art

In collaboration with the Embassy of Greece, Office of the Cultural Counselor and the Greek Film Centre, Athens .

The Travelling Players (O Thiasos)
June 3 at 2:30 p.m.

Alexander the Great (O Megalexandros)
June 10 at 2:30 p.m.

Voyage to Cythera (Taxidi sta Kithira )
June 17 at 2:30 p.m.

The Beekeeper (O Melissokomos)
June 18 at 4:30 p.m.

Landscape in the Mist (Topio stin Omichli)
June 24 at 1:00 p.m.

Eternity and a Day
June 24 at 4:00 p.m.

The Weeping Meadow (Trilogia I: To Livadi pou dakryzei )
June 25 at 4:00 p.m.

A singular voice in European art cinema for forty years, Greek cineast Theo Angelopoulos (b. 1935) has created an unprecedented body of work in his seventeen films. Collectively they comprise an odyssey through Greek history, myth, and culture. Beautiful, meditative, experimental, and devoid of simplistic truths, these films unfold in rural settings by means of a resonant film language consisting of mesmeric frames and spatially expressive tracking shots created by cameraman Giorgios Arvanitis. "We can easily point," wrote historian Andrew Horton, "to the Faulknerian interconnections among Angelopoulos' themes, characters, and locations."

***All film programs are held in the East Building Auditorium except where noted***

The Travelling Players (O Thiasos)
June 3 at 2:30 p.m.
With a Shakespearean tinge, The Travelling Players÷Greece's most artfully experimental and expensive film when it was released in the mid-1970s÷probes the country's recent past through the guise of itinerant players roaming the countryside while performing a popular folk melodrama: Golpho, the Lover of the Shepherdess. Interest and irony develop with a dramatic realization that the ancient legends of the Agamemnon cycle are unfolding among this group of modern actors. (1975, 35 mm, Greek with subtitles, 230 mins. with intermission, print shown by special permission of Theo Angelopoulos)
Calendar of Events | Theo Angelopoulos: Myth and History list

Alexander the Great (O Megalexandros)
June 10 at 2:30 p.m.
Not the the story of the historical Alexander, O Megalexandros fuses two themes: "the tradition of a Greek liberator and the so-called Dilessi incident of 1870, when a party of British aristocrats was kidnapped and murdered by the brigands who were an endemic feature of nineteenth-century Greece. Updating this affair to the first New Year's Eve of the twentieth century, the film provides a searching analysis of the cult of the political 'hero' and the corruption of ideals in a false new age."÷British Film Institute (1980, 35 mm, Greek with subtitles, 165 mins.)
Calendar of Events | Theo Angelopoulos: Myth and History list

Voyage to Cythera (Taxidi sta Kithira)
June 17 at 2:30 p.m.
Winner of the award for best scenario in its year at the Cannes Film Festival, Voyage to Cythera is the tale of an old Civil War fighter who returns after years of exile in Russia to torment his son (a stage director in Athens ) and his long-deserted wife. "Shot partly in the rain-drenched mountain regions and on the stormy quay at Piraeus , the film is as much a dream journey as a real one, as much myth as contemporary drama. (The island of the film's title is the last stop for many elderly Greeks who go there to live on their pensions.)"÷Pacific Film Archive (1983, 35 mm, Greek with subtitles, 137 mins.)
Calendar of Events | Theo Angelopoulos: Myth and History list

The Beekeeper (O Melissokomos)
June 18 at 4:30 p.m.
Angelopoulos conceived The Beekeeper to be the middle film of his "trilogy of silence" (with Voyage to Cythera and Landscape in the Mist). Co-written by Michelangelo Antonioni's scenarist Toniono Guerra and featuring one of the Italian director's favorite actors, the film is, according to Angelopoulos, "the journey of a beekeeper from north to south, a film about the silence of history, of love, of God." Marcello Mastroianni plays a retired teacher who abruptly leaves his wife and daughter and drives off with his beloved hives. Along the road he finds old friends and a hitchhiker who, wrote James Quandt, "reflect the director's concern with his country's historical amnesia." (1986, 35 mm, Greek with subtitles, 120 mins.)
Calendar of Events | Theo Angelopoulos: Myth and History list

Landscape in the Mist (Topio stin Omichli)
June 24 at 1:00 p.m.
"Every day young Alexander and his sister Voula wait on the station platform, anticipating the arrival of their father. Despite their vigil, the now mythical parent never materializes so they hop a train, determined to find him. Alternately exploited and protected, thrown off trains, and repudiated by an uncle and strangers alike, the two children traverse an adult world which, seen through their young eyes, resonates with the enchanting and the surreal."÷Pacific Film Archive (1988, 35 mm, Greek with subtitles, 122 mins.)
Calendar of Events | Theo Angelopoulos: Myth and History list

Eternity and a Day
June 24 at 4:00 p.m.
Bruno Ganz plays Alexandre, a writer vacating his apartment in Thessaloniki after learning he's terminally ill. Throughout the beautifully composed, elegiac film the dying writer sifts through his random thoughts on mortality, family, art, and the past. "Like Ingmar Bergman," wrote one New York Times reviewer, "whose sense of an intricately interwoven present and past is echoed in a fluid way, Angelopoulos turns the whole of his protagonist's life into something far greater than the sum of its parts." (1998, 35 mm, Greek with subtitles, 132 mins.)
Calendar of Events | Theo Angelopoulos: Myth and History list

The Weeping Meadow (Trilogia I: To Livadi pou dakryzei )
June 25 at 4:00 p.m.
This first panel of a projected triptych is Angelopoulos's latest completed project. The ultimate goal, he says, is nothing less than "a poetic summing up of the century that just ended." Spanning the years 1919 through 1949, The Weeping Meadow opens with a band of refugees on Greece 's northern plains. Young foundling Eleni falls in love with her adoptive brother and flees with him to the port of Thessaloniki . As the political disorder of the era unfolds, however, Eleni is left to bear the brunt of war and repression. "Angelopoulos' recurring semi-surreal dreamscapes are not mere effects....This is Homeric filmmaking, uniquely worthy of the word."÷Michael Atkinson (2004, 35 mm, Greek with subtitles, 170 mins.)
Calendar of Events | Theo Angelopoulos: Myth and History list

For more information please contact Dr. Zoe Kosmidou at: info@greekculture.us or visit: http://www.nga.gov/programs/filmtheo.shtm and www.greekculture.us/film

Cultural Events—April-June 2005

April 30 — May 29, 2005.
Saturday at 3:30 & 7:00 PM, Sunday at 12:30 & 3:30

May 5 - June 26, 2005.
Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays at 8:00 pm, Sundays at 3:00 pm

April 9, 2005, 2:00 PM
Author Reading and Signing
Who: GEORGE PELECANOS
What: Drama City
When: Saturday, April 9 at 2:00 pm
Where: Barnes & Noble (organizer)
4801 Bethesda Avenue, Bethesda, MD 20814

George Pelecanos is the author of twelve crime/noir novels set in and around Washington, D.C.: A Firing Offense, Nick's Trip, Shoedog, Down By the River Where the Dead Men Go, The Big Blowdown, King Suckerman, The Sweet Forever, Shame the Devil, Right as Rain, Hell to Pay, Soul Circus, and Hard Revolution. Hell to Pay was the recipient of the 2003 Los Angeles Times Book Award. The Big Blowdown won the International Crime Novel of the Year award in France, Germany, and Japan. His short fiction has appeared in Esquire and the collections Unusual Suspects, Best American Mystery Stories of 1997, Measure of Poison, and Best American Mystery Stories of 2002. He is an award-winning journalist and essayist who has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, GQ, Uncut, Mojo, and numerous other publications. Esquire magazine called Pelecanos "the poet laureate of the D.C. crime world."

To receive information on the Embassy’s Greek Cultural Program and the Calendar of Greek Cultural Events in Washington, please send your contact information to:
info@greekculture.us or call: 202-939-1364.