Above all, I find that the works of Theo Angelopoulos invoke stillness and silence. The fact that they almost always feature characters on the run or undergoing personal journeys of discovery seems irrelevant. Angelopoulos seemed to arrange his films not in terms of plot advancement, but by set pieces full of astonishing imagery. His characters would drift from one fantastic locale to the next in a kind of daze while always seeking...something. In Landscape in the Mist, he sets his camera on two young children seeking entry into Germany where they believe their estranged father lives. Their reasons for leaving are never very clear, but something powerful drives them forward. They encounter many strange, wonderful, and dangerous things: a group of traveling actors, a giant stone hand being lifted from a bay by a helicopter, rampant industrial decay. They find some who help them, like one young man with a motorcycle that they keep encountering. But they are not always that lucky. One of the children is forced to trade her virginity for passage. But such are the sacrifices that must be made. The entire film plays like an allegory for an ancient epic that time forgot, like one of the corrupted passages of the Epic of Gilgamesh or the final chapter of the Satyricon. Angelopoulos creates a kind of doppelganger of our world where a light drizzle constantly falls, seemingly abandoned smokestacks still cough, and incomprehensible horrors lay around each bend. It is a cinematic fever dream of which I was terrified to wake up from.
8/10
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