Slow aesthetics and traumatic history in Theo Angelopoulos’s trilogy of silence

Abstract

This dissertation reinterprets Theo Angelopoulos’ trilogy of silence (Voyage to Cythera, The Beekeeper and Landscape in the Mist) through the conception of slowness and trauma, and illustrates the relation between cinematic slowness and traumatic history in the auteur’s cinematic project. Angelopoulos makes regular appearance in the early discussions of slow cinema discourse, and this dissertation attempts to connect Angelopoulos’s cinematic slowness to trauma studies, thereby opening up a reading of his films. In the analysis of narrative and mise-en-scène, the conception of slowness will be formulated based on Gilles Deleuze’s time-image and Lutz Koepnick’s contemporary slowness, while the notion of trauma is informed by Freud’s texts, Cathy Caruth’s trauma theory and the psychological theory of assumptive world. This dissertation argues that the trilogy of silence recounts the Greek traumatic history through the slow process of mourning, melancholia, and transcendence respectively, thereby pointing towards a mode of slow-recollection cinema, which allows us to contemplate the coexistence of multiple temporalities, and functions as a witness of the traumatic history of modernity in the twentieth century.