The European Critics Award 2004

Prix FIPRESCI
The European Film Academy Critics Award 2004
Theo Angelopoulos, "The Weeping Meadow"
By Michel Ciment

Twelve films in 35 years: few directors have built up such a coherent body of work and reached such a constant level of achievement as Theo Angelopoulos. The Weeping Meadow, as the first part of a trilogy, is a kind of summing-up of the last century and a journey through the films of the Greek director, from the travelling artists (this time musicians) in the work that made him world-famous to the slaughtered sheep of Alexander The Great, and with a woman as the central figure for the first time since his first feature, The Reconstruction.

Like Angelopoulos' debut film, The Weeping Meadow offers numerous echoes of Greek tragedies like Oedipus Rex or Antigone, with Eleni as a mother-figure in mourning and the murder of the father by the son who steals his wife from him. The Travelling Players was also inspired by the Atrids, while Angelopoulos' succeeding films have been more akin to Homer's Odyssey.

The mytho-poetic dimension of his new work (including the young musician as Orpheus) is, as usual, linked to a strong political and social context. The film spans 30 years of Greek history, from the exodus of the Greek colony in Odessa under the threat of the Red Army in 1919 to the end of the Civil War in 1949, via the Metaxas dictatorship in the thirties and the resistance of the people against Nazi Germany in World War II. Already conspicuous in The Suspended Step of the Stork and Ulysses' Gaze, the refugee theme is central to The Weeping Meadow. It seems to symbolise a century of displaced people, always in transit, victims of wars and internecine battles. In that perspective, water becomes a key visual element, reflecting the passing of time and the unending journey, an ambiguous metaphor for being both a saviour (the river helps the young lover to escape from his pursuers) and a destructive force (the flooding of the village).

Angelopoulos proves again that he is a master of visual compositions, from the carrying of the corpse of the father on a raft accompanied by innumerable boats to the wounded man stumbling among the white sheets. The magic fusion of colours, sounds, music and images able to express the deepest feelings surrounding life and death defines The Weeping Meadow as a cinema of poetry, all too rare in present-day production. And it is this rare accomplishment that FIPRESCI has wanted to single out among the European films of 2004.

Michel Ciment
© FIPRESCI 2004

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