Theo Angelopoulos

"History is not dead: it is only taking a nap."

"You cannot help but be influenced by a place and its culture when you grow up there, especially at a particular time, as I did, when the church was an important part of my cultural (not necessarily religious) life."

"The world needs cinema now more than ever. It may be the last important form of resistance to the deteriorating world in which we live. In dealing with borders, boundaries, the mixing of languages and cultures today, I am trying to seek a new humanism, a new way."

"I draw techniques from everything I've seen [...] I continue to love [...] very much the films of Murnau, Mizoguchi, Antonioni. More recently: Tarkovsky's Stalker, Godard's Every Man for Himself and of course Ordet. [...] But the only specific influences I acknowledge are Orson Welles, for his use of plan-sequence and deep focus, and Mizoguchi, for his use of time and off-camera space."

"Theo Angelopoulos is a masterful filmmaker. He really understands how to control the frame. There are sequences in his work—the wedding scene in The Suspended Step of the Stork; the rape scene in Landscape in the Mist; or any given scene in The Traveling Players—where the slightest movement, the slightest change in distance, sends reverberations through the film and through the viewer. The total effect is hypnotic, sweeping, and profoundly emotional. His sense of control is almost otherworldly."

"Angelopoulos belongs to a generation for which the cinema could no longer be innocent."