Theodoros Angelopoulos was born in Athens on 27 April 1935. His father Spyros hailed from the town of Ampeliona,
Messenia in the
Peloponnese. During the
Greek Civil War, his father was taken hostage and returned when Angelopoulos was 9 years old; according to the director, the absence of his father and looking for him among the dead bodies (during the "
Dekemvriana" in Athens) had a great impact on his cinematography. He studied law at the
University of Athens, but after his military service went to Paris to attend the
Sorbonne. He soon dropped out to study film at the
Institut des hautes études cinématographiques (IDHEC) before returning to Greece. There, he worked as a journalist and film critic. Angelopoulos began making films after the 1967 coup that began the
Regime of the Colonels. He made his first short film in 1968 and in the 1970s he began making a series of political feature films about modern Greece: ''
Days of '36 (Meres Tou 36
, 1972), The Travelling Players (O Thiassos
, 1975) and The Hunters (I Kynighoi'', 1977). In 1978, he was a member of the jury at the
28th Berlin International Film Festival. He quickly established a characteristic style, marked by slow, episodic and ambiguous narrative structures as well as
long takes (
The Travelling Players, for example, consists of only 80 shots in about four hours of film). These takes often include meticulously choreographed and complicated scenes involving many actors. His regular collaborators include the
cinematographer Giorgos Arvanitis, the screenwriter
Tonino Guerra and the composer
Eleni Karaindrou. One of the recurring themes of his work is immigration, the flight from homeland and the return, as well as the history of 20th century Greece. Angelopoulos was considered by British film critics
Derek Malcolm and
David Thomson as one of the world's greatest directors. Famous film directors including
Werner Herzog Emir Kusturica,
Akira Kurosawa,
Ingmar Bergman,
Wim Wenders,
Dušan Makavejev,
William Friedkin,
Manoel de Oliveira,
Michelangelo Antonioni among others, were also admirers of his works. While critics have speculated on how he developed his style, Angelopoulos made clear in one interview that "The only specific influences I acknowledge are
Orson Welles for his use of plan-sequence and
deep focus, and
Mizoguchi, for his use of time and off-camera space." He had also cited
Andrei Tarkovsky's 1979 work
Stalker as an influence. Angelopoulos was awarded honorary doctorates by the
Université libre de Bruxelles, Belgium in 1995, by
Paris West University Nanterre La Défense, France, by the
University of Essex, UK in July 2001, by the
University of Western Macedonia, Greece in December 2008, and by the
University of the Aegean, Greece in December 2009. == Death ==