Ulysses’ Gaze: A Gaze on History

The first thing God created was the journey, and then came doubt and nostalgia.

––Ulysses’ Gaze (01:24:59–01:25:07)

​Gazing into the blue sailing ship from afar, diasporic Greek-American filmmaker A. (Harvey Keitel) mumbles, “The three reels. The three reels. The journey.” That is how the protagonist of Theo Angelopoulos’s film Ulysses’ Gaze begins his odyssey in the Balkans, searching for three undeveloped film reels shot by the Manakis brothers. They are thought to have been shot even earlier than the first film in the Balkans, The Weavers. The prologue reveals silent black-and-white footage of The Weavers with A.’s commentary voice-over, “weavers, in Avdella, a Greek village, 1905. The first film made by the brothers Miltos and Yannakis Manakis. The first film ever made in Greece and the Balkans. But is that a fact? Is it the first film? The first gaze?” (Angelopoulos 00:15–01:17). The opening images have framed the cinematic journey of seeking the historical truth revealed from archives and evidence. A. begins in America and travels across northern Greece, Albania, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Bulgaria, Romania, and Serbia to the final destination—the war zone of besieged Sarajevo and persists despite various dangers, challenges, and strange encounters. Along the odyssey, the non-linear cycling structure of the narrative and the paradoxical coexistence of multiple temporalities have confused the audience as to the ultimate purpose of the quest. The puzzle magnifies after A. finally watches the released films against all odds. Not only does the audience never get to know what is in the reels, but he is not filled with satisfaction as one would expect in the ending of a conventional lost-and-found story—his pain, sorrow, and tearfulness in the eyes suggest otherwise. Then why is he so obsessed with the three reels? While the two-hour odyssey has built up a sense of longing and hope for the final discovery, why does it end unexpectedly with a burden in one’s mind? How do we interpret this ambiguous ending and understand the lack of closure in the film?

           Throughout the film, A. holds an intense obsession over the three reels from the early twentieth century, which, as he believes, could reveal something about the history of the Balkans or even contain messages for the contemporary world. The film was shot and staged in 1995, during the later stages of the Bosnian War and the siege of Sarajevo. Under the turmoil in the Balkans, Manakis’ works serve as objective reflections of the ambiguities, contrasts, and conflicts during the decline of the Ottoman Empire (36:53–37:04). They are not concerned with politics or racial issues but with the people (35:47–36:22). Ostensibly, this behavior would suggest that A. fits into what Haitian-American anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot considers as “positivist” in his text “The Power in the Story.” His reference to historical positivism indicates a dominant practice in Western scholarship that historians should strive to comprehend the objective truth of the past. By finding the reels in this “personal journey,” A. wishes to “reveal the past” and “discover or, at least, approximate the truth” (5) that once resided there and to complete the Balkans’ history. He even emphasizes his role of assembling the past with the assertion, “What am I if not a collector of vanished gazes?” (02:16:46–02:16:53). However, the sense of incompleteness in the ending has somehow opposed the notion of positivism: his goals have been fulfilled, and the lost “history” has been found. His reactions do not align with our understanding of fulfillment. Nevertheless, isn’t that what he has always wanted?

           An interpretation could be that his tears and pained gaze indicate “the pain experienced in [his] encounter with the scraps of the archive” (4), as American writer and scholar Saidiya Hartman acknowledged in her essay “Venus in Two Acts.” Archive is fragmental in nature. What is in it could be much less than one expected. She describes that archive has its limits when formulating “cultural history” (Hartman 11) and its impossibility of representing human figures in the historical narration. One explanation could be that in the “making of archives” or “the moment of fact assembly” (Trouillot 26), there could exist an uneven power distribution, and thus the “history” depicted in archives is dominated by narratives from the “subjects of power” or victors. Meanwhile, the “objects of power” might suffer from secondary victimization, even if it is in the form of fiction (Hartman 4, 10). Archives, often single-voiced, certainly do not do them justice. Although Ulysses’ Gaze does not actively touch on the power dynamics in historical narratives, this perspective has strengthened the fact that archives never fully yield their secrets: The patches of light dappling on a blank screen, accompanied by the reel rolling sound on the last scene (2:44:23–33), hint at the inability of empirical facts, archives, and historical evidence to illustrate the complete picture of historical truth and history itself. Nothing is shown, as if nothing has happened. As A. goes on with his odyssey, the audience gazes into history with him and realizes that the “history” illustrated in the film is pluralist, non-synchronous, and temporally dispersed.

           To approach the notion of history, Angelopoulos used a unique filmmaking technique to imitate his understanding of history. In the opening scene, the footage of the Manakis brothers’ grandmother weaving at her loom in The Weavers from 1905 fades into a distant, hazy black-and-white view of the horizon, subsequently traveling back to 1954, when Yannakis Manakis wanted to capture a blue ship there in the port of Thessaloniki. The camera pulls back to reveal the old man operating a photographic camera. Suddenly, he collapses back onto his chair after suffering a heart attack. His camera assistant slowly makes his way back toward the right side of the screen while being followed by a long shot. He describes how he wrote to A. about how Manakis used to “ramble on about three undeveloped reels.” While A. enters the frame, it is revealed that the assistant has been recounting Manakis’ death to A. as the two of them are standing by the harbor of Thessaloniki. After A. makes his way back to where the audience just watched Manakis pass away, the shot follows his gaze toward the sea, where the blue ship is sailing out of sight. These left-to-right and back-again camera motions coincide with temporal movements from the present to the past and from the past to the present across forty years, all of which are captured in the same long sequence shot (01:16–04:08).

           In this scene, temporally distant but intimately related historical events are harmonically placed in the same cinematic image. The blending and fusion of temporalities in one three-minute long take expose the paradoxical coexistence of past, present, and possibly the future as a “recombinant narrative” (Hartman 12). This method attempts to narrate the past as the present, or in this case, to narrate Manakis’ death as a part of A.’s contemporaneity as the motif of his journey. These moments from multiple temporalities, or “building blocks of the narrative” (Hartman 11), are subtly fabricated and merged into a scene in which the dead are mingled with the living. With the Manakis brothers’ The Weavers and A.’s memories woven throughout the film, history, in this sense, is temporally dispersed. It does not simply arise from a historical archive or event but is revealed in every time period. Hence, it is impossible to have a sole proper representation of the past since it is always entangled with other temporalities.

           Moments in the movie also resonated with Trouillot’s theory on the entanglements of the past and the present. The notion that “[t]he past—or, more precisely, pastness—is a position” (Trouillot 15) points out that our understanding of the past is based on our present position and in the context of the contemporary world. After A. arrives at the besieged Sarajevo, he finally meets Ivo Levy (Erland Josephson), the curator of an underground film archive who has attempted to reconstitute the chemical formula for developing the missing reels before the war. A. has successfully persuaded him to keep working with the reels. During a celebratory walk by the riverbank on a sporadic foggy day, the man and his family are mercilessly shot and killed by the military force. As a witness to the brutality of the war, A. is soaked with tears, guilt, and pain. The tragic killing occurs at an unexpectedly fast pace, which lets it foreground the rest of the film, creating a climax (02:38:13–02:39:20). What is covered by the fog is not only the murder scene or the corpses but also the blurry line between the past and the present. History is a continuum. While chasing the past, A. is actively involved in the never-ending wars in the Balkans, in the present, and, more precisely, in the production of history (Trouillot 25). When talking about his process of developing the films, Levy mentioned, “What’s the point now with all this slaughter going on?” (02:04:47–02:04:53). But only after Levy’s death and A.’s personal experience of the “history” in his present does he understand the past, as well as the contemporaneity of the past. This “history” has been internalized and formulated as his memory. Perhaps that is also why Angelopoulos did not give a name to our protagonist but just an alphabet letter instead: sometimes the role as a “subject” or an “actor” of history is reduced to such a minimal point that no one accounts for it, as there are numerous nameless figures in history (Hartman 2). Instead of being a “historian” searching for empirical evidence, A. is a historical figure himself.

           In Ulysses’ Gaze, A. undertakes a “long journey of waiting to see that gaze” (02:37:35), a gaze on the past and history. Unlike the expectation from him and the audience on the revelation from the historical archive, the odyssey depicted that history is temporally dispersed, non-synchronous, and ongoing. By utilizing filming techniques of long takes and merged scenes, Angelopoulos has created an atmosphere that “intensif[ies] its fictions” (Hartman 9) and immense space for reflection from a contemporary perspective. The complexity of the film leads us to wonder: Where should we position ourselves in history? As a historian, an archivist, a narrator, or an actor? Are we all A. at some point in our lives? The responsibilities and obligations that come with these positions would strongly influence our approaches to daily life and our gazes in our own time. With all these intricacies, how do we begin?

Works Cited

 Angelopoulos, Theo, director. Το βλέμμα του Οδυσσέα [Ulysses’ Gaze]. performances by Harvey Keitel, Maïa Morgenstern and Erland Josephson, Roissy Films, 1995.

 Hartman, Saidiya. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe, vol. 12, no. 2, 2008, pp. 1–14.

 Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. “The Power in the Story.” Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Beacon Press, 1995, pp. 1–30.