We have a film. A captive gaze, as you called it, from the
early days of the century, set free at last, at the end of the
century. Isn't that an important event?
The gaze as event. A
journey. The gaze as captive. Nostalgia. The gaze mediated by
film. Memory. The first gaze. A lost gaze. These are the
preoccupations of Theo Angelopoulos's 1995 film
The film,
depicting the sweeping Balkan journey of a Greek-American director,
played by Harvey Keitel, won the Grand Jury Prize at the 1995 Cannes
Film Festival. Keitel plays A
(we never learn any more
name than that, but it does not stretch the imagination to think it
might stand for Angelopoulos). He is a Greek-born director who returns
to his Balkan roots after years in America. He has heard of three lost
reels of film made by two brothers in the dawning years of film and of
the century and he journeys throughout the Balkans in search of the
lost reels.
The search for the Manakias brothers films takes A from Greece into Albania and on to Bitola (Monastir), in Macedonia, where the brothers had their business (the brothers and their business in Bitola are historical fact, not of the fictional realm of the film), and from there to Bulgaria, Romania and up the Danube on a Lenin-bearing barge to Belgrade, finding himself at last in Sarajevo. The resulting gaze of the Balkans, as A searches for that elusive, lost, first gaze of the Manakis brothers, is the subject of this paper.
The gaze is
a key element in the Slovenian redaction of Lacanian theory (and
indeed, even in Lacan's own writings), thus is it the perfect prism
through which to analyze a film as preoccupied with the gaze as this
one. In his book, The gaze marks the point in the
object (in the picture) from which the subject viewing it is already
gazed at, i.e., it is the object that is gazing at me.
This
creates a coincidence of our gaze with the gaze of the other. This
paper will use &Zhachek;i&zhachek;ek and other Slovenian Lacanian
theorists to explore how the gaze functions in the Balkans which are
imagined through the gaze of Angelopoulos' film.