Artists pay tribute to late filmmaker Theo Angelopoulos
Five years to the day after his death in a traffic accident while filming, acclaimed director, screenwriter and producer Theo Angelopoulos is being honored with an exhibition at the Kaplanon Gallery in Athens, featuring works inspired by his cinematic oeuvre.
For many, Angelopoulos’s death after being hit by a motorcycle during a shoot for “The Other Sea” in Drapetsona, a suburb of Piraeus, also signaled the end of New Greek Cinema, as he was regarded as a pioneer of the movement and one of its most internationally recognized proponents.
Angelopoulos launched his career in 1970 with the black-and-white drama “Reconstruction,” about a crime of passion that could in different hands have been just another melodrama. His ensuing work went on to explore an imaginary Greece through landscapes and sets that evoked the modern Greek tragedy.
His cinema was like a vast canvas that played with fog and rain, at time exposed to a quality of light that expressed a certain ambiguity: You never quite knew whether it was dusk or dawn. His oeuvre served as a journey into invisible sides of history, while also shedding light on a traumatic period of the country’s history.
The exhibition runs to February 18 and features pieces by Dimitris Anastasiou, Eva Apostolatou, Irini Vogiatzi, Leonidas Gelos, Maria Diakodimitriou, Stamatis Theocharis, Giorgos Karakasoglou, Leda Kontogiannopoulou, Sofia Kyriakou, Nikos Leontopoulos, Achileas Pitsionis, Giorgos Saltaferos, Vassilis Soulis, Georgia Fambris and Katerina Hadalou.
Kaplanon, 5 Kaplanon & Massalias, tel 210.339.0946, www.kaplanongalleries.com
