The films of the late Theo Angelopoulos have been praised for their historical ambition, political themes and explorations of memory, but also for their commitment to cinematic modernism. For some critics, like David Bordwell, Angelopoulos is a late modernist auteur whose ‘anachronistic’ cinematic style bears the hallmarks of 1960s and ‘70s ‘political modernism’ (1997: 106; see also Rodowick 1988). For others, like Fredric Jameson, Angelopoulos’ work is best understood as hybrid or transitional: grounded in an aesthetic and historical sensibility that combines progressive elements, which render collective memory through a materialist aesthetic, and regressive elements, which revert to an individualistic, humanistic framing of the post-historical condition of ‘left-wing melancholy’ (Jameson 1997; see also Benjamin [1931] 1974). How do these overlapping readings of Angelopoulos – as late modernist, as historical mythmaker and as ambiguous innovator – hang together? How does Angelopoulos’ aesthetic style express historical experience and cultural memory? How might this project work in an age that remains sceptical about cinema's cultural-historical powers of aesthetic resistance?

Angelopoulos’ ‘trilogy of borders’ – in particular, his best-known film Το Bλέμμα του Οδυσσέα (Ulysses’ Gaze, 1995) – offers a way into addressing these questions, though the memorialisation of collective experience through cinema marks all of his work. In what follows, I shall explore how his films combine history, myth and politics in ways that constitute a cinema of historical experience, collective memory and ethical responsiveness. His films offer striking examples of how cinema can be regarded as philosophical, indeed as cases of a ‘cinematic thinking’: films that explore history, European identity and the crit- ical potential of cinema after the demise of political modernism; films which not only capture historical experience, involuntary memory and duration, but which also articulate thought through images. Angelopoulos’ films reflect upon how this cinematic and historical legacy might be renewed, posing questions concerning the historical and political prospects of the ‘new Europe’.