Silence of God

Theo Angelopoulos'un "Silence" üçlemesinin son filmi olan Landscape in the Mist için Tanrı metaforu üzerinden yaptığım okuma:

*Metnin ingilizce olmasının sebebi "Avrupa Sineması" dersimin ödevi olmasından kaynaklanıyor.

Silence of God

Landscape in the Mist is the last film of Theo Angelopoulos’s “Trilogy of silence”. The film is about a story of two children who start a journey to find their father. In fact, even from this sentence, we easily recognize the figure of the father is the primary metaphor for the entity of God. There are several figures that remind us and the characters that God’s in silence. He only reminds himself but never intervenes the events that the children struggle with.

One of the figures, and the most obvious one, is the tree. The tree appears at the end of the film. Orestes, the actor who helps the children, finds an empty film strip on the floor in one of the scenes. He says that he saw a tree on the strip and he tries to show it to the children. But they can’t see the tree. Actually, this is the first appearance of God in the film. This tree figure reminds us the “Tree of Life”. Tree of Life is the metaphor for the livelihood of the spirit, in mythology. It means eternity in most mythologies and it is the way to God. “If you find the Tree of Life, you find the God.” In this scene, children can’t see the tree because they have some more jobs to do and some more distances to cover. Therefore this is not the right time to find the father.

Another figure that represents the metaphor of God is the giant hand sculpture. God reminds himself again by appearing from the sea which is the ultimate mother of the mankind in mythology. The first finger of the sculpture is torn apart. The first finger points something and gives orders and directions. This sculpture makes the children desperate because he says that he couldn’t give the directions. Therefore they have to find out their directions and the right way. In this scene, sculpture is removed from them to the sky by the helicopter of the army. This scene basically shows how miserable the human in the new world that is governed by the state and the technology which is projected to us as a monster in the whole film. Angelopoulos brings back that new world which is governed by this monster technology in the scene that a man with a car trails along a horse in the street. The children watch the horse dying. And this is another figure that destroys our hopes about the God’s power on human beings. The horse is the figure of the holly power of God. In the primitive ages, the horse is the symbol of power. However in the new world human with the power of the technology kills the horse, the power of God. Therefore we completely believe that God’s in silence now.

One of the most tangible figures is the third character, Orestes that represents the silence of God. Orestes is an actor in a theatre group. He is also despised by the new world just like another artist, violinist, in the film. Orestes is a mentor to the children on their journey to find their father. Again in mythology, Agamemnon’s and Klytemnestra’s son Orestes kills his mother because she had an affair with someone. Klytemnestra also killed her husband Agamemnon. I believe that the name of the character is not a coincidence in the film because Orestes loves his father and he is the one who guides the children which loves their father more than their mother. However, his guidance is not forever because he is one of the losers of the new world and God again does not solve this problem for the children because he is in silence for them.

In the first part of the film, we listen to some monologues as the letters that are supposed to be sent to their father but never be sent. We know that their father doesn’t even exist. But Angelopoulos surprises us at the end of the film. He shows the tree of life from the mist and says that the children actually find their ultimate father and their letters are sent now.