ABSTRACT
Breathless, panting with exertion, film archivist Ivo Levy gasps this story into life haltingly, beat-by-beat, as he runs, bent down with the weight of heavy water canisters, across a Sarajevo bridge. Alert, hounded by the omnipresent snipers and shells, Levy recounts this experience to the Greek filmmaker, A, with an urgency that mirrors the desperate encounters that run all the way through Theo Angelopoulos’s Ulysses’ Gaze – fleeting connections driven more by need than by desire, more by pressure than by choice. A, played by Harvey Keitel, has traveled across seven countries and into the war-zone in search of the film reels in Levy’s lab: three undeveloped reels, perhaps the first film of Greek cinema. While the narrative of A’s quest enacts the repeated rituals of borders and divisions across the rugged terrain of southeastern Europe, it is crossings and connections that drive it forward – the bridge rather than the boundary is its pertinent motif.1
