Ulysses’ Gaze (Greek: Το βλέμμα του Οδυσσέα, translit. To Vlemma tou Odyssea) is a 1995 Greek film directed by Theo Angelopoulos. The actor Gian Maria Volonté died during the filming. He was replaced by Erland Josephson. An exiled Greek filmmaker is returning home and sets out on an epic journey across the battered Balkans in search of three lost reels of film by the Manakis brothers, the pioneering photographers who introduced movies into the Balkans at the beginning of the century. The search for the reels of film works as a metaphor for a search for the common history of the Balkan countries. Angelopoulos began making films after the 1967 coup that began the Greek military dictatorship known as the Regime of the Colonels. He made his first short film in 1968 and in the 1970s he began making a series of political feature films about modern Greece: Days of ‘36 (Meres Tou 36, 1972), The Travelling Players (O Thiassos, 1975) and The Hunters (I Kynighoi, 1977). He quickly established a characteristic style, marked by slow, episodic and ambiguous narrative structures as well as long takes (The Travelling Players, for example, consists of only 80 shots in about four hours of film). These takes often include meticulously choreographed and complicated scenes involving many actors. His regular collaborators include the cinematographer Giorgos Arvanitis, the screenwriter Tonino Guerra and the composer Eleni Karaindrou. Angelopoulos is considered by British film critics Derek Malcolm and David Thomson as one of the world’s greatest living directors. Roger Ebert has stated that Angelopoulos must care very little for his audience.
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