Nostos or Ritournelle: The Spatio-Temporal Narrative of the Journey and Homecoming in the Movie of Ulysses’ Gaze

This chapter focuses on the movie Ulysses’ Gaze-To Vlemma tou Odyssea (1995) by renowned Greek director Theodoros Angelopoulos. It was shot during the Yugoslavian War. While depicting the socio-political climate of the late 1990s Europe, the aftermath of the Cold War, and the falling communist ideology in the Balkans; Angelopoulos develops a traversal narrative of the Balkan region and portrays the multicultural structure and the shared history of the region. Looking at the last hundred years of the territory, Angelopoulos blurs the line between the past and the present conditions by reconstructing a selected perspective of time-space, while highlighting the ever-changing faith and unrest in the region over the ages. More concretely, the movie depicts the fictive journey of protagonist A, a movie director coming home from his exile in the US for a film screening, to find three undeveloped roles of the Manaki Brothers, starting from Thessaloniki and moving through Sarajevo. This journey is dismantled by elaborating the notions of anastylosis and ritournelle-refrain, which are used as the methodology of the film. The key scenes of the journey are also dismantled sequentially to reflect the systematic representation and repeating scheme of Angelopoulos in developing the visual narrative via key actions, characters, spaces, and ambiance, as well as feelings.

Keywords: Anastylosis, balkans, homecoming, nostos, odyssey, ottoman Empire, ritournelle refrain, sarajevo, sultan Reşad, theodoros Angelopoulos, the Manaki Brothers, the journey, thessaloniki, ulysses’ Gaze, yugoslavian War.