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It was about a month into shooting, which is part of the extraordinary and absurd tragedy of all this. I have no idea how much was left nor how long his typical shooting schedules were. This is all especially awful as The Other Sea would have functioned as a fine career capstone. Now it may be one of the great unfinished projects.

A fitting tribute with more info from Sight & Sound.

Thank you, John, this is a very good article. He leaves an incredible legacy, yet he could accomplish so much more, it's tragic.

Angelopoulos was the greatest living film director. Yet he couldn't get a theatrical release for his last feature. Sadly, he outlived his time.

Yakushima wrote:Thank you, John, this is a very good article. He leaves an incredible legacy, yet he could accomplish so much more, it's tragic.

Indeed, although it disturbs me that the phrase "cultural vegetables" is being quoted as if it were, you know, something at all worth quoting.

More from Scott Foundas, who knew Angelopoulos.

dadaistnun wrote:Eiko Ishioka

She was often the best thing by far about some not-very-good films (Dracula, The Cell) and, at least once (Mishima), the best thing about one that was very good indeed.

J Adams wrote:Angelopoulos was the greatest living film director. Yet he couldn't get a theatrical release for his last feature. Sadly, he outlived his time.

He owed his profile in the UK entirely to Artificial Eye. While they may now be reissuing his entire feature output on DVD in three boxsets, they certainly didn't release all of them in cinemas. The Travelling Players was one of their first cinema releases, but the next Angelopoulos they released in UK cinemas was The Beekeeper. And (from memory, from a Sight & Sound article at the time) they passed on The Suspended Step of the Stork due to the poor performance of Landscape in the Mist. And The Dust of Time has gone straight to DVD.

Apart from that, the only chance anyone would have had to see an Angelopoulos film in the UK outside of a retrospective or festival screening was when Channel 4 showed Alexander the Great in 1984.

Very sad news all the same.

GaryC wrote:Apart from that, the only chance anyone would have had to see an Angelopoulos film in the UK outside of a retrospective or festival screening was when Channel 4 showed Alexander the Great in 1984.

Channel 4 did also show Ulysses Gaze - the first time in 2000 and again a year or so ago, presumably the presence of Harvey Keitel being the reason why it was more likely to be shown. I agree though that the UK media have not exactly gone all out on screenings of his work.

zedz wrote:

dadaistnun wrote:Eiko Ishioka

She was often the best thing by far about some not-very-good films (Dracula, The Cell) and, at least once (Mishima), the best thing about one that was very good indeed.

Don't forget that she also did the costumes and set design for the excellent, claustrophobic two-hander, Closet Land.

There are some quite wonderfully endearing stories on the Mishima disc about Ishioka designing sets but not realising due to not having worked on a film before that they had to be able to pull apart to let the camera get in there! But it was certainly worth any trouble that caused for such beautifully distinctive results.

Here's a nice video focusing on Ishioka's work on Dracula.

And here's the music video she directed for Bjork (NSFW!).

The Cell looks amazing with the 'flayed body' suit of armor from the opening of Dracula making an unorthodox reappearance as the suspension suits in the dream clinic - all those little touches certainly makes a rote serial killer film at least more visually interesting. I wonder what might become of Tarsem's next films, given that Ishioka's designs are such a huge part of The Cell, The Fall and Immortals.

Zalman King.

Sad to hear. He and Audie England enlivened my teenage years considerably. I nearly fell out of my chair when he turned up in The Beaches of Agnes.

While the emphasis will obviously be more on his producing Nine and a Half Weeks and the Red Shoe Diaries, I hope there is some attention paid to his acting roles up to the early 80s such as in Galaxy of Terror, and especially his lead role in the absolutely insane Blue Sunshine!

A very real tragic loss, as with the Angelopoulos passing. I didn't even realize he was ill. My most profound regret here is unfortunately a selfish one in that I never got the chance to interview him as I had planned. He was very open and inviting to that as well. But I drug out the prep stage for it for too long, assuming there was plenty of time. If this last month has proven anything it is that that can never be assumed or taken for granted. He seemed to be moving in some new directions with an embrace of DV for his most recent series. But I should have known there was a serious problem brewing as his personal site never did go fully active as was perpetually promised. I only hope that his collected body of work (much of it supremely brilliant) will eventually receive the reappraisal it so richly deserves. And I hope to be an active part of that.

No.

Damn, love that guy. He should have stayed off the salt!

colinr0380 wrote:While the emphasis will obviously be more on his producing Nine and a Half Weeks and the Red Shoe Diaries, I hope there is some attention paid to his acting roles up to the early 80s such as in Galaxy of Terror, and especially his lead role in the absolutely insane Blue Sunshine!

Not to mention his great performance in the even more insane Some Call it Loving.

And awful about Gazzara, too. Always a favourite. What I would have given to have been there to witness his shouting match with Pauline Kael.

AlexHansen wrote:Ben Gazzara

Another icon of cinema gone