His funeral will take place on Friday at 16.00 from the First Cemetery
The great Greek director Theodoros Angelopoulos, who was injured in a car accident that happened shortly before 7 on Tuesday afternoon on the Drapetsona ring road. The director suffered severe brain injuries and the doctors were concerned about whether he should undergo surgery or not.
It is noted that in EKAV, an EDE is carried out in order to clarify the causes of the delay of the axle carrier, at the scene of the accident.
According to the first information, the director was at the scene for a film shoot and at the moment he was crossing the road he was run over by a private motorcycle driven by a special guard who was off duty and was slightly injured.
The investigation of the circumstances under which the accident occurred has been undertaken by the Korydallos Traffic Police, to which the special guard is going to give a statement. As reported by Traffic officers, the incident happened at a distance of approx 30 meters from the exit of the first tunnel on the road towards Keratsini in a dangerous, as they characterize the point, due to the frequency of road accidents that happen there. At the same time, the "microscope" will include the images from a closed-circuit camera located in the tunnel that may have recorded the scene of the accident
The government representative Mr. Pantelis Kapsis with the announcement of the death of the leading Greek director stated: "We all mourn for the great Greek who honored our homeland with his work".
"Forget me in the sea"
"I wish you health and happiness but I can't make your journey/ I'm a visitor/ Everything I touch really hurts/ and then it doesn't belong to me/ And yet someone finds himself saying “it's mine”/ I have nothing of my own I once proudly said/ Now I understand that nothing is nothing/ That I don't even have a name/ And I have to look for one every now and then/ Give me a place to look/ Forget me at sea/ I wish you health and happiness".
(anecdotal poem by Theodoros Angelopoulos written the 1982 shortly before the start of writing the script for the film "Journey to Kythira")
When a director not only doesn't read but doesn't even count the books written about him and his work anymore, then it is at the top.
When on behalf of a film, has the ability to build and then tear down an entire village _as he did with "The Weeping Meadow"_ then he is on top. In France, for a single film by Theodoros Angelopoulos, the "Journey to Kythira", has been written 600 of pages (!) doctoral thesis which was then published commercially.
The opening credits of his film The Weeping Meadow
In Japan there was a stir when his films were released on a special DVD edition which, among other things, contained a recital - by his three daughters- poems he has written himself. In the bibliography concerning him we will even find books in Chinese (!) while whenever he announced even an idea for a film, then the film automatically became an event on the world cinema map many years before its completion just as it happened with his last creation "The other sea" which unfortunately will remain unfinished.
This is the spot where Thodoros Angelopoulos, who was born in 1936 in Athens and studied law and cinema in Paris. After passing through the area of criticism ("Change" newspaper, "Contemporary Cinema" magazine) the most important contemporary ambassador of Greek culture abroad, had been awarded the,what is important in the field of cinema: Palme d'Or at the Cannes festival for "An eternity and a day", grand prize of the committee for "The View of Odysseus" at the same festival, Golden Lion for "Alexander the Great" at the Venice Film Festival. Angelopoulos left leaving a huge void in Greek culture. The culture he believed in, the civilization for which he grieved so much and from his heart for its present decline.
"We are living in a period that I would call unique, not in a good sense but in a negative sense" he had said last year, such a time in Vima, Angelopoulos. "I have several years behind me and I have never experienced anything like this before. Even during the Civil War, in the period of the dictatorship or even in the Occupation, even then things had a strange dynamic, a dynamic underground, where he worked. There was a resistance, there were conflicts with an ideological content, there was the search for a better world. When we had a junta, we thought that at some point it would end and that things would open up. We believed in what seemed like it was going to happen and it never happened.".
Thodoros Angelopoulos managed to reach this point of power and recognition, patiently but also stubbornly cultivating his unique aesthetic and language through a series of films that capture the image and history of his Greece. Of our Greece. Of a Greece that exists next to us but that without the films of Theodoros Angelopoulos we might never have known. Greece in "Representation", of Greece in "Thiasos", of Greece in the "Days of '36", of Greece to "Alexander the Great", in "The Beekeeper" and "The View of Odysseus".
The scenes in the snow from the movie "The Troupe"
"I am a person who belongs to a generation that has gone through specific historical periods in all senses and with the impact of the historical present of each era on everyday life," Thodoros Angelopoulos had told Vima. "I think you can't stay out, and that's the essential difference between my generation of filmmakers and today's".
From the film by Theodoros Angelopoulos "Representation"
