This article focuses on issues of two bodies in director Theo Angelopoulos’ film Megalexandros (1980), widely considered to mark a transition point in his career, and examines the image of specter in his work after the 1980s.
Generally, Angelopoulos’ original visual style, characterized by the gesture and the image of those characters that appear repeatedly in his films, has been interpreted as showing his unique “artistic personality”. The classic definition of “film auteur” has still some essential meaning in the study of his works. However, there are problems that are not yet fully grasped through the previous studies that have attempted to understand his films in terms of the identity of a director or by situating them in their cultural, political and social context. One of those unnoticed problems is about two bodies in Megalexandros. In this film, the body of the character called Great King has a double weaning. It is a body possessed with past specters, while it is also a physical body for realization. The epilogue of this film does show that the body is divided into a broken statue and a boy, and the images of the two bodies have come to appear repeatedly in his films after the 1980s. The recurring images do not demonstrate any trace of “artistic personality”, but indicate that the filmmaker is in crisis.
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