A car pulled up at the street side. That was Alexandre. Earlier he paid a visit to his daughter's, hoping she could take care of his dog after he left, but it was unwelcomed by Alexandre’s son-in-law. He had no choice but to entrust the dog to his caretaker Ourania. In his way to find Ourania, Alexandre accidentally bumped into her son’s wedding. This Greek wedding is recorded with a long take lasting for approximately four minutes from 1:00:15 to 1:04:13 without any cuts in between.
In the beginning of this long take, the camera is focusing on Alexandre, getting off from his car and taking out his dog from it. This is when a bride appears at the street corner. As Alexandre’s eyes are drawn to her, the camera focus shifts as well and starts to track the wedding procession. With a 90-degree rotation, camera follows the bride and the crowd behind her walking to the other end of the street, where the groom is waiting. Then, along with the merry wedding music played by accordion and mandolin, this couple dancing all the way to the seaside.
Weddings are conventionally depicted as joyful events in movies, while it is not the case in <Eternity and a Day>. Using his subtle cinematography and camera language, Angelopoulos endows this wedding scene with a sense of calm, detached, and solitary. This solitude, to elaborate, is twofold.
The first level of the loneliness comes from within the film universe. Observing all the people in this scene, it can be found that the procession always prudently keeps a distance behind the bride instead of grouping together around her. There seems to be an invisible wall between the wedding couple and other people. They are fully dressed up while the crowd are wearing plain black clothes; two people are dancing and circling while others are apathetically walking and watching.
This frame is delicately separated to some extent. Respectively from the wedding couple and the crowd, two streams of emotions appear which cannot reach to or communicate with each other. Such inharmonious separation can also befound in terms of scene setting. This wedding procession is taking place in astreet surrounded by shabby buildings. Since the it is a dismal winter afternoon, along the streets are leafless trees trembling with their barebranches. Such scenery seems too dreary for a wedding.
In the frame, this couple is the only joyful element. While being surrounded by the impervious crowd and bleak environment, this joy seems so lonely. Here exists an echo to one of the philosophical themes that being explored in this film, which is the eternalsolitude of humanity. This scene contains its metaphoric meaning that human feelings are not sharable. From wedding to death, life is after all a lonely journey where other people can only stand aside with a distance and watch silently.
Such solitude is visualized with compositional skills. From 01:01:43-01:02:15, the camera slowly panned in when the bride is dancing on the spot. Here the conspicuous focus is the bride, and the surroundings are only empty streets. Other people are deliberately putting outside of the camera, except a few ones sitting motionlessly in distance with obscure faces. The bride’s solo dance and the empty space in composition both strengthen the loneliness in this scene.
A second level of solitude can be felt by the spectators. In shooting this scene, Angelopoulos deliberately create a sense of alienation, which gives the viewers an emotional detachment.
The first evidence is the shooting scale. In the 4-minute long take, most of the time he adopts long shots or extreme long shots. This shifts the focus to the whole environment but weaken the convey of emotion. The views are always invited to view this scene from a distanced position and can never closely and genuinely involved in this event.
The second evidence is Angelopoulos’s typical compositional skill --- the three-quarter rear view. In tracking the march of the wedding procession, the camera is positioned behind the crowd with a distance. This angle made everyone in this frame turn from the camera. As a rebellious attempt against the three-quarter frontal view in mainstream movies, Angelopoulos tries to minimize the direct access to the character’s facial expression so that the viewers can only read their emotions from the posture (Bordwell, 2005, p.162). This is abnormal for shooting a wedding where usually people would appear in front of the camera with joy faces. Similar to the effect of long shot, by deliberately arranging such composition with anabsence of faces, Angelopoulos are trying to block that bond between characters in the scene and the viewers so that make it hard to achieve any emotional resonance.
The last element that adds to the detachment is the sound effect. Throughout the scene, the only background sound is a wedding music, which is probably the most joyful one in the film. While such cheerful music doesn’t help to convey any happiness but only a deeper solitude, because in this scene, there is no sound or voice of human being. We see the couple dancing without hearing their laughters, also the procession of wedding guest is walking silently without any slight voice of talking. The absence of human voice in this scene consequently impairs the human connection, thus the spectators feel distant and detached.
Judging from all the techniques he uses, Angelopoulos tries to create dense atmosphere of solitary in this scene. Wedding ceremony, as an event inherently connected to positive and happiness emotions, is deliberately represented in a slow, distant, and detached manner. One of the messages this scene seems to convey is that “this is a happy wedding, but it has nothing to do with me.”
Interestingly, in the wedding scene, everyone is dressed in black except for the bride who is in white. This is a perfect mirror image to Alexandre’s memory where everyone wears white clothes except him. If the inverted color is a detail designed by the director, then this scene can also be interpreted as reflecting Alexandre’s feelings. Contrary to his happiest memory by the seaside, this wedding is an epitome of his most solitary parts inside: this is a happy wedding, but it has nothing to do with him, just like everything else in the world.
Reference list:
Bordwell, D. (2005). Angelopoulos, or Melancholy. In Figures traced in light: on cinematic staging (pp.140-185). Berkeley and Los Angeles:University of California Press.
