Théo Angelopoulos. Le temps suspendu. Yorgos Archimandritis

10 × 19 cm 144 pages softback coedition institut lumière/actes sud may 2021 retail price: 12 €

all rights available except greek language

Yorgos Archimandritis is a writer and journalist. A doctor in comparative literature at the Sorbonne, he has produced radio documentaries for France Culture and rts (Switzerland) and a series of major interviews which were published in the French and international press. In 2008, he was appointed cultural ambassador to the French presidency of the European Union. In 2010 he became a Chevalier de l’ordre des Arts et des Lettres, and in 2019, an officier de l’ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He has also written Mikis Théodorakis par lui-même (Actes Sud, 2011), Danielle Mitterand. Mot à mot (Le Cherche-Midi, 2010), Mélina Mercouri, une star en Amérique (Patakis, 2014).

Le temps suspendu

THÉO ANGELOPOULOS

Time suspended

Yorgos Archimandritis

Theo Angelopoulos is probably the most important Greek filmmaker of our times. Since his Grand Prix at Cannes with Ulysses’ Gaze in 1995, then the Palme d’or with Eternity and a Day in 1998, he has marked world cinema with his sensitivity and his ability to film the history of mankind through that of his people. The personal becomes universal in his works which are steeped in their time. This work draws on the interviews he made with the writer Yorgos Archimandritis broadcast on France Culture radio in 2009 in which he tells of his childhood in World War II, his discover of poetry and then cinema, the generals’ putsch in Greece, and his exile in France when he was still a student. The filmmaker tells of his relationship to the arts, including music, painting and literature, a source to him of inner peace and to answers of mankind’s existential questions. Published for the first time today these exchanges speak volumes of the man, his work, and his fascination for the creative process. Here he tells us how, for him, cinema is an act of resistance to the loss of utopia and a way of providing fresh perspectives on our disenchanted world.