Tears of Sublimation

I was soaked in tears when watching Ulysses' Gaze this afternoon, especially in scenes when A (Harvey Keitel) was travelling through present and past, memories and imaginations, bliss and bitterness, longings and regrets - just like in Eternity and A Day. But those were not tears of sadness, rather tears of sublimation. The music and the images summoned up some unspeakable sentiments deep in my soul.

If Visconti could best depict the aristocratic elegance and decadent obsession in Proust's In Search of Lost Time - a project he didn't manage to complete during his lifetime, Angelopoulos is undoubtedly the one and only one, if not the last one - for I can't see any potential ones coming, that can best transcend onto screen Proust's loneliness, nostalgia, complexes, unmendable scars, lost regrets and of course all those streams of consciousness...

「沒有任何其他藝術形式比電影更能補捉時間的流逝，而又更能保留時間，讓它一回又一回地重覆自己。」

「安哲羅普洛斯......說：『人的肉身永遠都在日常瑣事中糾纏不清，而沉默的心靈則無言地編織思緒，直到一天，機緣巧合，隱秘的圖像浮現出來，水到渠成地糅合到現實生活的千絲萬縷裡去。』學者們可以花上洋洋萬言，從希臘的歷史、政治、文化、神話......，去解讀安哲羅普洛斯的電影，卻始終不若他自己寥寥數語來得來得精確清晰。其電影的藝術魅力，正正來自那些沉著恬靜、神秘詩意的影象——」

—黃愛玲

"You come all this way looking for something that's believed to be lost..."

—S (Erland Josephson), in Ulysses' Gaze