SPOILER insofar that an attempt is made to interpret the end of the film.
If John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress" is the greatest work of road literature, Theo Angelopoulos's "Landscape in the Mist" deserves similar status among road movies. I use this association deliberately as far too often this film is merely described as the search of an adolescent girl and her small brother for their father whom they have been led to believe has left their native Greece and is living in Germany.If this was all the film was about it would make little sense, for although set within the parameters of reality (wintry landscapes often brutalised by industry), strange things continually happen; a horse dies in a freezing square at night just as a wedding party is breaking up, people rush from a building as the first snowfall is announced and stand transfixed like statues gazing upwards, an elderly man enters an otherwise empty cafe and plays a melancholy tune on a violin for the small boy who has gone there in search of food, a helicopter slowly draws a giant sculptured hand from the sea until it is poised high above a harbour. And then there is the tiny fragment of photographic negative found in a city street that the boy then carries with him and which seems to show a solitary tree in a misty landscape which in turn becomes the background for the final shot of the film. It is impossible not to interpret the work as anything other than an allegory, like Bunyan's, as a quest for spiritual enlightenment. Only then can we understand that the border between Greece and the North is metaphysical rather than national. As the children cross from one country to another in a landscape completely shrouded in mist shots of border guards break out. Only through the transition between life and death can they reach the place they have been seeking. Since the loss of Satyajit Ray the mantle of the world's greatest director has, in my opinion, passed to Angelopoulos. "Landscape in the Mist" is the most sublime work he has yet given us.
If John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress" is the greatest work of road literature, Theo Angelopoulos's "Landscape in the Mist" deserves similar status among road movies. I use this association deliberately as far too often this film is merely described as the search of an adolescent girl and her small brother for their father whom they have been led to believe has left their native Greece and is living in Germany.If this was all the film was about it would make little sense, for although set within the parameters of reality (wintry landscapes often brutalised by industry), strange things continually happen; a horse dies in a freezing square at night just as a wedding party is breaking up, people rush from a building as the first snowfall is announced and stand transfixed like statues gazing upwards, an elderly man enters an otherwise empty cafe and plays a melancholy tune on a violin for the small boy who has gone there in search of food, a helicopter slowly draws a giant sculptured hand from the sea until it is poised high above a harbour. And then there is the tiny fragment of photographic negative found in a city street that the boy then carries with him and which seems to show a solitary tree in a misty landscape which in turn becomes the background for the final shot of the film. It is impossible not to interpret the work as anything other than an allegory, like Bunyan's, as a quest for spiritual enlightenment. Only then can we understand that the border between Greece and the North is metaphysical rather than national. As the children cross from one country to another in a landscape completely shrouded in mist shots of border guards break out. Only through the transition between life and death can they reach the place they have been seeking. Since the loss of Satyajit Ray the mantle of the world's greatest director has, in my opinion, passed to Angelopoulos. "Landscape in the Mist" is the most sublime work he has yet given us.