Nostalgia for utopia in the films of Theo Angelopoulos

Abstract

In this article, I examine the notion of nostalgia in relation to the films of Theo Angelopoulos. I argue that the image of nostalgia that pervades his films does not call for the restoration of the past but rather lends itself to a sense of hope which I approach as an image of utopia. Drawing a line of comparison between Angelopoulos and the Greek poet George Seferis (who had a pivotal role in the shaping of a modern Greek identity and whose images of melancholy were recurrent points of reference for the director), I claim that Angelopoulos’s films are haunted by an image of utopia which is registered as a possibility in the present rather than an abstract projection into the future. Unlike Seferis’s nostalgia which is directly related to the fate of the nation, in Angelopoulos’s work the past returns to foreshadow a utopia beyond the frame of the nation state and away from the figuration of a one-way future projected by the capitalist social relations of the present.