Postmodern Odysseys: Cinematic Estrangement in Ulysses’ Gaze

“Nobody is my name.”

— Odysseus to Polyphemus, The Odyssey

In perhaps the most well-read passage of the Homeric epic The Odyssey, the eponymous Odysseus outsmarts his cyclopean half-brother Polyphemus by touting his own name as Nobody. Thus, when the cyclops calls out to his brethren after being blinded by Odysseus’ burning spear, he can only shout a fruitless plea: Nobody is killing me. As Odysseus recounts (or more aptly, exaggerates) his victory to the Phaeacian royal court, it is not only a demonstration of his immense strategic wit, but also a moment of grand, narrative irony: the mythic hero and veteran of Troy, of boundless kleos and renown, momentarily reducing himself to the humble stature of Nobody.

Generations later, Greece had departed from its golden era of idyllic heroes and instead found itself steeped in the geopolitical turmoil of the mid to late 20th century. Reeling from political instability, conflict, and civil war, the nation had no triumphant, Odyssean figure to rally behind, and as the population’s sense of identity and national belonging became increasingly fragmented, the idea of being a Nobody inherited a new genealogy. These feelings of displacement fueled postmodernist film movements in Greece, spearheaded by none other than the late, cinematic titan Theo Angelopoulos.

In what is critically regarded as his magnum opus, Ulysses’ Gaze (1995), Angelopoulos imagines a contemporary Odysseus in the form of a mysterious protagonist simply named “A,” a filmmaker who sets across various borders in search of three undeveloped, primordial film reels apocryphally claimed to be the first films shot in the Balkans. Diametrically opposed to Odysseus’ stalwart goal to return home and reinstate his sovereignty over Ithaca, A often finds himself aimless, lost, and unsure of what exactly he is searching for. A’s lack of resolve and motivation is not only a mirror to Angelopoulos’ personal, waning artistic drive, but also to broader Balkan lassitudes stemming from decades of conflict.

Furthermore, following Angelopoulos’ tendency to bend history and cloud the lines of realism, the central actors all play multiple roles through the film, many of them strewn across various historical epochs. Romanian actress Maia Morgenstern takes on a total of four separate characters in Ulysses’ Gaze, and A’s American actor Harvey Keitel acts as numerous characters spanning the late 1910s to the early 1990s. A grand paradox emerges from Angelopoulos’ casting decision: in playing a blurry mixture of characters, the actors truly end up playing none at all. They have no identity to cling to; they are Nobodies. Such a contradiction gestures to Angelopoulos’ own idea of what it means to be Nobody in the wake of reverberative global catastrophes that leave us with strewn-about selfhoods and piecemeal senses of belonging.

These notions of estrangement stretch across the film’s entire 180-minute runtime. When A finds himself trekking through the interstitial border territory between Albania and Greece, the landscape is covered with droves of statue-like migrants, all seemingly lost and frozen in the snowy gloom as they await an exit that will likely never come. Angelopoulos’ emphasis on border crises within the Balkans is yet another departure from the Homeric tendency to portray characters as inextricable from their polis, or city-state, of origin. Rarely does Odysseus’ path intersect with drifters and derelicts such as himself; instead, he encounters kings, royals, gods, nymphs, and warriors, all of whom have well-defined homes within their own factions.

The conclusion of Ulysses’ Gaze, in true postmodernist style, is drenched in aimlessness. We find A—who by this point in the story has both successfully found the mythical reels he sought out for, as well as lost numerous loved ones to the surrounding warfare—crying alone in an artillery-stricken theater as the final moments of the reels flicker on screen. As if possessed, A then breaks into a soliloquy reminiscent of Odysseus’ own words to Penelope, professing “when I return…it will be with another man’s clothes…another man’s name.” In saying this, A sheds the last remaining scraps of his identity, relinquishing his form, his name, and what little purpose he has left. He forfeits his identity irreversibly: in the shameful wake of tragedy and unrequited desire, and with nowhere left to go, A becomes Nobody.

It is easy to pose Angelopoulos as a cynic irreverent to his cultural predecessors. Indeed, Angelopoulos constructs a pessimistic view of the contemporary “Nobody,” one that is no longer a heroic persona donned at will, but a tragic, inevitable fog that saturates the postmodern condition. Yet, it is crucial to observe that A begins his final soliloquoy with a promise of the future: “When I return.” Yes, Ulysses’ Gaze is a rebuke of the outdated, idealized Greek hero, but it is not a submission to the present, postmodern disillusionment either. There is cautious faith that the sense of estrangement endemic to our current generation is only temporary. Though both A and Angelopoulos accepted their own fates, they never forfeited hope for the future—that perhaps, the fog would one day begin to clear.