Michelangelo Antonioni's early 1960s cinema has long been recognised as one of the key influences on Theo Angelopoulos’ filmmaking. The director himself has often been quoted as describing Antonioni's epochal L'avventura (1960) as a seminal moment in his development, reportedly watching it thirteen times while a student in Paris during the early 1960s (cited in Archimandritis 2013: 26). What exactly is it about Antonioni's work that was so formative for Angelopoulos, and how can we see its effects play out in his own subsequent films? More than simply illustrating authorial influence, by examining the connections between these two filmmakers as well as some important differences, this chapter seeks to explore the ways in which, through their work, we can chart the complex development of European feature film modernism itself.

CHARTING POST-WAR MODERNIST CINEMA

Scholars such as John Orr (1993: 1), András Bálint Kovács (2007: 2, 156), David Bordwell (2005: 144), Fredric Jameson (1997: 80), and Andrew Horton (1997a: 1–10) have often painted post-war modernist cinema's development, and frequently Angelopoulos’ role within it, as largely comprised of post-war innovation and apogee followed by ‘late’ extension, closure and death. I will explore ahead how, where the films seek to retain some fidelity to contemporary history, post-war European – not to mention global – modernism remains intimately bound up with such a dialectical narrative of generativity and loss. Yet in the process, this cinema (itself building on earlier innovations by filmmakers such as Carl Theodor Dryer and F. W. Murnau in Europe, not to mention Kenji Mizoguchi in Japan) also emerges as ultimately telling a less linear, more complicated story than such accounts can sometimes suggest.

This is due to the paradoxical but fully explainable and historically embedded fusion in both Antonioni's and Angelopoulos’ work between modernism and a realist commitment to engaging with the contemporary world in all its multilayered challenge, its horror and lingering sense of possibility. In this chapter, I present the development from one filmmaker to the other as both logical but also requiring sustained interrogation for what it reveals: both about European film modernism's complex trajectory but also the particular regional, national and global realities such films seek to essay and interrogate.