Unleashing the Future: Deleuze's Crystals of Time and Theo Angelopoulos' 'The Travelling Players'

Retsikas, Kostas

Abstract

This article discusses The Travelling Players (1975), Theo Angelopoulos's provocative film, by upholding the priority the director's audio-visual images assign to the future as what Deleuze calls ‘the pure and empty form of time’. It also argues that The Travelling Players supplements the Deleuzian quartet of crystal-images with a new type of crystal-image: Angelopoulos crafts images of extraordinary consistency that act as filters, splitting and sieving time at once, a kind of audio-visual refinery laid out on the silver screen, with the distillation process dedicated to blocking repression, its past and present iterations, from contaminating the yet-to-come, banishing the negative from returning in the future.

Citation

Retsikas, K. (2024). Unleashing the Future: Deleuze's Crystals of Time and Theo Angelopoulos' 'The Travelling Players'. Deleuze & Guattari Studies, 18(4), 570-594. https://doi.org/10.3366/dlgs.2024.0573

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Oct 20, 2023
• Publication Date: Oct 1, 2024
• Deposit Date: Nov 21, 2023
• Publicly Available Date: Nov 21, 2023
• Journal: Deleuze and Guattari Studies
• Print ISSN: 2398-9777
• Electronic ISSN: 2398-9785
• Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 18
• Issue: 4
• Pages: 570-594
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.3366/dlgs.2024.0573
• Keywords: Time, Theo Angelopoulos, Deleuze, ‘The Travelling Players’, Cinema, Greece