The following excerpt is complementary to Activity No. 1 (General Discussion):

Eternity constitutes a composition. Initially, three ideas came up for the shooting of three different films: the last day of a cancer patient who is about to be hospitalized – and most probably won’t make it; the topic on the children of the streets; and the idea of a film about the national poet Dionysios Solomos. After several discussions with Tonino Guerra and Petros Markaris, Angelopoulos brought them together in one film. The writing process of the script has been described by Petros Markaris in a recently published book under the title The Diary of an Eternity. Concerning the selection of the film’s protagonist, the director came across several obstacles. He wanted Marcello Mastroianni but he was very sick. He turned to Jean-Louis Trintignant, but he just got out of the hospital. He tried to find Erland Josephson, but he had a heart attack. He had some doubts for Bruno Ganz – the actor who finally got the part – because he was a Wim Wenders actor…  The shooting was completed in two different instalments in Thessaloniki and in Ouranoupoli of Chalkidiki region, during the autumn of 1997 and the winter and spring of 1998 respectively. The Palme d’Or in Cannes Film Festival that was awarded to the film the previous spring allowed it to be promoted in 42 countries. It is the first Greek film that finds distribution in so many countries, after Zorba the Greek by Michael Cacoyannis.

Konstantinos Themelis, Theodoros Angelopoulos: The Past as a History, the Future as a Form, Athens: Ypsilon 1998.

Language

The following excerpt is complementary to Activity No. 1 (4. Historical and Social Context, Excerpt A):

According to Heidegger (and as cited by Angelopoulos), “our only home is our mother tongue”, and Alexandros repeats it: “Because the only moments I came back were the ones when I got the opportunity to speak my language… my own language… When I could still find the lost words or to drag up from the silence forgotten ones, why only then I could listen to my steps again resonate in the house? Question and affirmation at the same time. The task to regain our mother tongue means that we ought to regain our personal one first, however, our historical and cultural identity, meeting again with our roots and our history, means to re-discover the magical power of language, setting it free from the cultural and political corruption of the modern world. Solomos regained his mother tongue, the forgotten one, paying a price for every single word that was offered to him. That is the significance of his work and that is creativity: we pay a price for the words we save from oblivion in order to conclude a work which could remain incomplete, for which we shall continue to give a fight. However, poetry cannot be sold out, so, it confronts obstacles. However, poetry is the only thing that can change the world, because it’s the only true revolution.

Paola Minucci, “The Only True Revolution,” Elephtherotypia, 20 November 1998

Count

The following excerpt can be used as a complement to Activity No 3.

–Of course, there’s the theme of the memory in the film…

–The theme of memory… Yes. However, the past we carry with us is continuously present. The work I’ve formerly done on the concept of the present and the past was based on the historical time, based on a collective memory, as described in the film The Travelling Players. Here, a clear perception of one personal time exists, focusing on one individual. The truth is that in every film of mine a certain work on the theme of time takes place. In the previous film there is the famous scene where in one year time all the historical times are introduced. However, here everything is focused on one individual, in-between reality and imagination. A certain level of reality exists, but in the very next moment it is overturned by one aspect of the imaginary, it is either confused or diffused. The perpetual game of time between the present, the past and the projection towards the future, is continuous throughout the film.

[…] Yet, memory alters everything…

Yes, it surely does. The difference is that it doesn’t matter that everything alters, because everything is experienced as a reality at the same time. Let me give you an example. I was in Paris and they asked me from a famous T.V. show of the French television to visit the Greek House “Cite Universitaire,” where I passed my first years when I was in Paris. In my mind the House was really big and luminous. When I got there, I saw a small House, dark streets, a dark and small room. However, in my mind everything stayed luminous and big. This is what happens in the film. There’s been sweetness in the things that comes out from the memory, which softens them and at the same time it dilates them, because it needs that kind of dilation.

Theodoros Angelopoulos, interview to Nino Fenek Mikelidis, Epsilon, 1998, History of Greek Cinema (Volume 5, documents 1970-2000)

 Return

The following excerpt can be used as a complement to Activity No 4 (Step 2)

The film Eternity and a Day is a “return” film: to moments in which we didn’t wait and we quickly surpassed, images we didn’t have the time to enjoy, thoughts that remained incomplete, words we have never uttered because silence overtook them. It is no coincidence that the director re-creates (variations of) landscapes from his earlier filmography, that he develops scenes that he hadn’t been able to complete in the past, simply by allowing insinuations to flourish. A film that catches us by surprise, like a forgotten, creased letter we discover at the back of a drawer, whose reading brings melancholy and moves us, a letter that drips slowly and painfully” like the poet’s lyrics:   που σταλάζει αργά και βασανιστικά όπως οι στίχοι του ποιητή: “Come back often and take hold of me, sensation that I love come back and take hold of me… ” Only difference is that the director resists this instigation.

Maria Katsounaki, Kathimerini, 23 October 1998, History of Greek Cinema (Volume 5, documents 1970-2000)

7. Narrate

The following excerpt can be used as a complement to Activity No 4 (Step 2)

 In Eternity… a remarkable model sequence takes place. Alexandros crosses the room (physically and mentally as well) of his existence. His slow thoughts: rare, intense words, full of nostalgia, giving a life’s review. Alexandros turns the stereo on, he listens to the music, he turns it off and walks to the window. A stranger repeats, like an answer to a call, the same musical phrase that Alexandros has just listened. The film camera, from Alexandros’ point of view, frames the window where the music comes from and after a while a curtain alone moving by the wind: a thin fabric barrier. In this simple and ordinary image a great rate of emotions are included, and it feels like Alexandros’ psychological condition has been crystallized: his desire and his fears towards the discovery of the other, his subsurface delectation to live everything unstated.

Michele Francesco Afferrante, “Un cinema d’interiorità” / “A Cinema of Interiority,” in AA.VV, Art, Life and Cinematic Representation, Rome: Εnte dello spettacolo, pontificio della cultura, 1999