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Voyage to Cythera

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• Duration: 136 mins

Cast and crew

• Director: Theo Angelopoulos
• Screenwriter: Theo Angelopoulos, Theo Valentinos, Tonino Guerra
• Julio Brogi
• Manos Katrakis
• Mary Chronopoulou
• Dionyssis Papayannopoulos
• Dora Volanaki

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Vernon, florida, burn hollywood burn, reviews notice : undefined property: stdclass::$abbr in /home/ynzfj9x7aokd/public_html/reviews.php on line 78 ">taking time: the cinema of theodoros angelopoulos.

Voyage to Cythera

Taxidi Sta Kithira

Theodoros Angelopoulos

Greece , 1983

Review by Jonathan Foltz

Posted on 19 November 2012

Source Artificial Eye DVD

Categories Taking Time: The Cinema of Theodoros Angelopoulos

What is that dreary island—the black one there? Cythera, someone says, the one in the song banal Eldorado of old-timers: it isn’t much of a place, as you can see. [… ] On Aphrodite’s island all I found was a token gallows where my image hung… Lord give me strength and courage to behold my body and my heart without disgust!

—Charles Baudelaire, “A Voyage to Cythera”

There is a reason that Cythera - land of Aphrodite and the site of many pastoral dreams of love and utopian happiness - is an island. The distant geography of the ideal alerts us that one of the chief mysteries of idealized romance is that it separates us from the people and places we love. This means that love, despite the halo of warmth that sometimes accompanies its promise, just as easily invites abandonment, exile, and melancholy. To return to the enigmatic site of love is to become disappointed archeologists, morbidly sorting through the rubble of the past. To the roving mind of Charles Baudelaire, the profligate poet and high priest of modern dissipation, the name for this forsaken love is Cythera. The island of Cythera, he writes (in the poem from which Theo Angelopoulos took the title of his 1983 film), is “revered forever by all mortal men” as the place where the goddess of love floats around “like a fragrance,” a “voluptuary ghost,” and yet it is also strangely barren, uninhabited (“now nothing more than a thistled promontory / vexed by the wheeling gulls’ unruly cries”). Peeking closer, we discover that what the speaker initially takes to be a tree on the horizon is in fact a “branching gallows-tree” where birds are “ravaging the ripe corpse hanging there, / driving their filthy beaks like cruel drills / into each cranny of its rotten flesh.” This eyeless, pecked and mottled corpse, the speaker says, is his own double: “rapture’s child,” the true “Inhabitant of Cythera.”

There is no question that Angelopoulos, who spent a number of years studying in France before returning to Greece, drew on Baudelaire’s grim poem for his hazy picture of Cythera as the icon of disappointment. Still, Cythera is also a real place, its politics and provincialism coinciding uncomfortably with the gothic fever dreams foisted upon it by foreign poets. Angelopoulos’ characteristically diffuse and beautiful film engages both the longing of a personal lyricism with the more ordinary weightiness of political history, without feeling obliged to anchor us recognizably in any one register. Voyage to Cythera ’s drifting tone and bewilderingly unmoored style creates a feeling of dense, deliberate ambivalence about both its themes and characters. At once a love story (about an aging patriarch estranged from his wife and family) and a political allegory about the faded dreams of the post-war Left, Angelopoulos’ film stretches these unmistakably Significant Themes to the point where we have trouble recognizing them anymore, except to see the angle where they are eclipsed by a world of striking visual dynamism and delirious scale. By encouraging a rapturous disattention to the perspective (and sometimes even the location!) of its main characters, Voyage to Cythera installs a distance between the viewer and the world of the film almost as great as those the separate the characters from each other. It would be easy to misunderstand the rigor of Angelopoulos’ filmmaking, which in its long-take style evokes a familiar aesthetic of strident visual alienation (from the modern anguish of Antonioni to the mystical revelations of Tarkovsky). But Voyage to Cythera is remarkable for the way it seems to push back against the ostentatious statement-making cinema whose style it inherits. There is a wonderful, almost illegible, banality in Angelopoulos’ modernist style here, an uncommon naturalness in the film’s baroque compositions that could almost distract us from the apocalyptic world that we are left to sort through in the devastating final frames. This is minimalist cinema wonderfully unredeemed by the self-awareness it creates, and reveling in the prosaic ability of the camera to denature our sense of action.

Anyone who promises to summarize a film like Voyage to Cythera should immediately arouse your suspicion. This is because even basic elements of the plot, the identity and relationships of the characters, are insistently withheld, remaining speculative even after a second viewing. Delaying, and even leaving out, so much crucial narrative information, Angelopoulos is a practitioner of that special brand of cinema that reduces his commentators to a keen state of embarrassment. That said: Voyage to Cythera is ostensibly the story of Alexandros—a dour, be-spectacled director making a film about an old dissident, Spyros, returning from over 30 years of political exile in Russia to rejoin (and then run away from, and then rejoin) his wife, daughter and son (played by the film-with-a-film by an identically clad Alexandros). The unstable, barely-speaking, family decides to take a trip to visit their old cottage out in a small village community. After reconnecting with one of his revolutionary comrades - through a wonderfully strange language of bird-calls, formerly used as “outlaw code” - Spyros finds that his farmland, laying fallow these thirty years, is about to be sold to a company intent on building an expensive resort (a fairly unlikely venture given the remote, wasteland-ish, countryside!). Unwilling to sell, Spyros spoils the plans of the entire community, disappears again (and is found again), before being arrested by the police, stripped of his citizenship, and finally - because the ship meant to deport him has already left - sailed out to a small raft kept floating in international waters, where the police intend to leave him, unguarded, unfed, and generally unattended, until the government decides what to do with him. In a final gesture of desperation, Spyros’ estranged wife, Katarina - who can’t bear to see him shunted out of her life a second time - asks to join him on the raft. Once reunited, Katarina and Spyros untie the rope holding them in place, and, in an unforgettable final shot, drift off together into the misty ocean: without a country, without a family, and in a situation which we would feel certain is going to lead to a slow death if the shot weren’t already so derealized by style as to seem indemnified by the deathlessness of metaphor.

As you might be able to tell from this brief summary, quite a lot happens in Voyage to Cythera for a film ostensibly indifferent to the dramatic urgencies of plot. Indeed, one of the mysteries about the film is the sense in which Angelopoulos’ style forestalls the eventfulness of what happens - using the “dedramatized” sequence shot aesthetic that David Bordwell associates with European art cinema - but also drives the plot forward, introducing new relationships and recalibrating old ones in almost every sequence of the film. Early in the film, we find Alexandros, in his role as director wandering around the studio during a large casting call, which has already begun as he arrives. It is a group audition, with scores of old men, in dusty suits, standing against a curved white wall. One by one, each old man walks up to the casting director and utters a nondescript (if philosophically over-determined) line - “It’s me” - before exiting the set immediately afterward, without waiting for any kind of signal of judgment or appraisal. It’s a confusing, and absurdly funny scene where the monotony of the actors saying the same line approaches a strange sort of cacophonous hum. The duration of the scene is complicated, too, for what we notice first is the strange hilarity of this repetition but Angelopoulos maintains the take long enough to let the initial humor drift into a numbed kind of normalcy. No one seems clear on what is being looked for. Alexandros makes no comment and eventually just walks away. It is as though the audition has been going on interminably, though it would seem from the obscure dialogue (and from Alexandros’ apparent indifference) that it is only a bit part, an insignificant detail in a film with more important matters for him to attend to. Of course, it will later be revealed that the part is for Spyros himself, the lead of the film! It is as though the film were not so much narrating these events or relationships, but planting seeds of events which the audience will be able to recognize only later. This part of the film’s cruelty, but also its black sense of humor. In the moment it feels like nothing is happening, but in retrospect it’s easy to be awed by just how densely orchestrated that emptiness had been.

Following this shot, Alexandros walks out of the set and onto the lot (now crowded with dejected actors looking for a signal of approval!) where he enters a café. After exchanging some words with an actress (who we learn is also his mistress), Alexandros sidles up to the bar and stares silently for a few moments before catching sight of a new old man, not an actor from the audition, who comes in selling stalks of lavender. Mesmerized by the man’s reflection in a mirror, Alexandros wanders out of the café to follow him, flagrantly leaving his mistress essentially mid-conversation, tracking the old man obsessively down the street, through the subway and eventually down to the docks. Why is he following him? We don’t know at first, though it will later become clear that he has discovered the “right” old man for the part. Again, a moment that initially seems like a distraction from the main action of the scene grows enormously in importance—but only later. Alexandros’ exchange with his mistress is also significant (we later discover that part of what she says to him is an excerpt from the film’s script) but no one would think so based solely on his blank, indifferent reaction during the scene. What this suggests is that Angelopoulos is obliging us to adjust our viewing. It is not that the scenes contain no dramatic or narrative element; rather, whatever narrative we uncover from the film we discover first by way of a deliberate indirection and subsequent formal resonances. That is, the narrative itself is never given, but always reconstructed by the audience. Angelopoulos’ wandering camera - which fixates on seemingly irrelevant details and constantly pulls away from individual characters to show their disposition in space - is presciently preparing us to make connections whose significance we will have to tease out only after the shot is over.

This makes the film’s disorientation just as important as its compositional beauty, because what we experience first as confusion we rediscover later as a structuring element, a formal doubling or counterpoint. Later in the film, when we find the group of villagers arced around a table to sign away their land in the business deal that Spyros will later sour, we recognize the scene (and perhaps also the actors!) from the casting call, walking up as their name is called to answer “present” instead of the prior “It’s me” (a line that also swims through the film in different incarnations). After Spyros has been sequestered to his Kafka-esque floating Guantanamo, the family takes shelter during a rainstorm in a station by the water while a band performs songs as preparation for a workers festival. It is a scene that at one moment we watch reflected in a mirror and in the background, as Alexandros - out of focus - stands in front of us, listening to Voula explain her sexual encounter with a strange man a few seconds before: “Sometimes it happens that I no longer believe in anything. At these times I turn back to my body,” she says, “it’s the only thing that reminds me that I’m alive”—the same line of dialogue that the actress, Alexandros’ mistress, had recited back in the lot café when he found himself entranced by the old man’s image reflected in the mirror (does she also play this part in the film?). In this way, the audience is consistently thrown back to a previous spot in the film and asked to momentary pieces of visual and auditory information to make sense of the mysteriously unfolding, and increasingly absurd, present. The ball which Alexandros rolls to the feet of his son (also named Spyros) is reincarnated in the apple that rolls on the ground as Spyros (the elder) and Katarina sit in the train station. The melody that Alexandros finds himself recalling (and which is doubled on the soundtrack) as he walks through the rain-soaked streets after a late night rendezvous also mirrors Spyros’ secret bird-whistle code. In a film obsessed with the melancholic quality of returning to a past that no longer exists, Angelopoulos’ style continually mediates our viewing through the memory of what has come before. As we watch, we find ourselves sifting through details that initially seemed trivial to find buried correspondences that recur with the inexplicable structure of myth or allegory. This is a formal style, in other words, that is also a theory of history.

Perhaps, then, the film-within-a-film conceit is less important for what it shows about Alexandros’ state of mind than as a way of calling attention to the autonomy of style itself, its floating independence from any psychological position in the film. It is quite puzzling to read interviews with Angelopoulos which show how clearly autobiographical parts of the film were, 1 and where Alexandros’ relationship with his film’s main character, Spyros, is described as a “sublimated father-son” relationship. Indeed, what is striking about Voyage to Cythera is just how unhelpful psychological readings become. Throughout the film, Alexandros is a dead wall of Bressonian impassivity—as is most everybody. “You’re dead,” says one of the villagers to Spyros, angry that he has returned to ruin their business deal, “A ghost. You don’t exist.” The same might be said of all of the characters in the film. But Angelopoulos finds ways of pulling such dizzying beauty out of these numbed revenants that we don’t mind too much their absent faces. Old Spyros, the embattled Katarina, and mercurial Voula—all (with the possible exception of Alexandros who is nothing but a cipher here) convince us that there is something essential being disclosed in their Bartleby-like reluctance to take part in the world around them. Nobody in the film even bats an eye when Spyros is dragged out to his floating holding-cell where he is exposed on the ocean to winds and rain. They are making preparations for a festival! Every absurd development is treated with inhuman deadpan as if it were the habitual texture of the ordinary. After all, what could shock these characters, for whom everything has happened before—an uncanny knowledge reinforced by the obsessive use of long-take cinematography and sequence shots. It is as though Angelpoulos’ world were irremediably wounded by the fact of continuing to exist.

Voyage to Cythera is a film of astounding patience, subtlety and drift. Despite Angelopoulos’ evident meticulousness with his staging and the camera’s choreography, the film seldom seems overburdened with intention, symbolism and weighty commentary—as the films of Antonioni and Tarkovsky sometimes become. Even the final shot of the film - which is plainly allegorical - feels remarkably open-ended and anti-climactic (we are given no “The End,” for instance, to signal the movie’s conclusion). Part of Angelopoulos’ power is that although his films are deeply encumbered by the past - by Greek culture, politics and mythology, as well by the conventions of art-house filmmaking - Voyage to Cythera occasionally discovers a way of re-engaging the ordinary, the trivial, the momentary (all those hallmarks of modernism), a way, that is, of releasing the long-take of its overbearing symbolism. It would then come as no great surprise that the current incarnation of long-take film-making - now kept alive in Asian cinema - owes Angelopoulos perhaps a more profound debt than his oft-cited precursors. Tsai Ming-liang, to take a clear example, quotes the cataclysmic final image of Voyage to Cythera in his astounding film, I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone , replacing Spyros’ stateless drifting raft for the sexual alienation of Hsiao-Kang’s ethereal mattress. Anyone interested by the continued power of the long-take to animate contemporary cinema needs to revisit Angelopoulos, whose films have long been preparing the way for its survival.

• The fact that Angelopoulos dubbed all of the dialogue for Italian actor, Giulio Brogi, only adds to this autobiographical reading. ↩

By Jonathan Foltz   ©2012 NotComing.com

More Taking Time: The Cinema of Theodoros Angelopoulos

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Voyage to Cythera

Manos Katrakis (Spyros) Mary Hronopoulou (Voula) Dionysis Papagiannopoulos (Antonis) Dora Volanaki (Katerina) Giulio Brogi (Alexandros) Giorgos Nezos (Panagiotis) Athinodoros Prousalis (Police Major) Mihalis Giannatos (Harbor Master) Vasilis Tsaglos (President of Dockworkers) Despoina Geroulanou (Alexandros' Wife)

Theodoros Angelopoulos

An old communist returns to Greece after 32 years in the Soviet Union. However, things aren't the way he had hoped for.

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Voyage to Cythera, 1984

A pensive, middle-aged filmmaker named Alexander (Giulio Brogi, but whose voice was dubbed in Greek by Theo Angelopoulos) on a shooting break from the filming of a semi-autobiographical feature that explores the plight of returning political refugees during the general amnesty of the 1970s, encounters a gaunt, yet ennobled old man selling lavender at a kafeneon (a village cafeteria and lounge). Captivated by the humble vendor who perhaps bears a resemblance to his own absent father, Alexander follows the old man into the mist. Does Alexander, the abandoned son, believe this man to be his father, or does he, the director, envision this frail elder to be the ideal embodiment of the aging partisan (a part that he has been unable to cast) for his film? Reality becomes obscured in the metaphor of the enveloping fog. Soon, the old man, Spyros (Manos Katrakis) emerges from the harbor carrying his meager possessions – a suitcase and a violin – having returned home on a temporary visa after a 32-year exile in Uzbekistan. Politely but disaffectedly acknowledged by his adult children Alexander and Voula (Mary Chronopoulou), he is accompanied to see their mother, Katerina (Dora Volanaki), a nurturing woman who greets him with the simple yet poignant words, “Have you eaten?”. Nevertheless, despite Katerina’s tempered welcome, Spyros’ homecoming invariably proves to be overwhelming as well-intentioned relatives, now virtual strangers, amass at the house for the eagerly awaited reunion. In an attempt to help him readjust to his ‘new’ life, the family decides to travel to their neglected, rural home in a near-deserted village in order to reconnect Spyros with familiar images from his past. Communicating through a series of coded, bird call-like whistles, Spyros reunites with an old family friend named Panayiotis (Giorgos Nezos) at a graveyard populated by fallen contemporaries. It is a bittersweet reconciliation between two aging neighbors – once divided by the devastating civil war – that momentarily brings a sense of closure to the melancholic and emotionally burdened Spyros. However, when Spyros discovers that the village is in the process of being acquired by commercial developers for a proposed resort, his refusal to participate in the sale of the land reopens the town’s unhealed wounds towards the defiant and unapologetic rebel.

The first film of Theo Angelopoulos’ self-described Trilogy of Silence (that also includes The Beekeeper and Landscape in the Mist ), Voyage to Cythera is a sublimely poetic, elegiac, and profoundly moving portrait of disconnection, aging, and obsolescence. Using a film-within-a-film structure, Angelopoulos interweaves personal observation and historical account into a compelling testament on the tragic legacy of the Greek civil war. Through Angelopoulos’ alter-ego, Alexander’s dual role as film director and Spyros’ son (who, in an oblique sense, may not be ‘acting’ in a fictionalized film), Angelopoulos correlates the abandonment, decay, and ruin of the Greek village witnessed by Spyros and his family with the subsequent apathy, callousness, and moral erosion of contemporary society encountered by Alexander as he attempts to find humanity and compassion for the uncertain plight of his disenfranchised and literally adrift father. Angelopoulos further illustrates the underlying hypocrisy of Spyros’ persecution as a forcibly uprooted and marginalized national (who is essentially stripped of his citizenship and reduced to refugee status in his own country) struggling to retain the spirit of a dying culture, even as the community is eager to collective sell its ancestral homeland – its figurative national soul – and move away. Caught in an absurd, existential limbo of bureaucracy and emotional desolation, Spyros’ interminable journey home, like the mythical voyage to Cythera, becomes one of human faith, connection, perseverance, and dignity.

© Acquarello 2003. All rights reserved.

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Theo Angelopoulos’ VOYAGE TO CYTHERA

Saturday, April 27

(1984) “A filmmaker, Alexandros (Giulio Brogi), auditions a succession of old men who speak the line, ‘It's me, it's me.’ Tiring of the task, he goes to a café and sees his perfect actor, a lavender-seller. Alexandros follows the man to Piraeus where, it transpires, the filmmaker is to meet his father, a resistance fighter (Manos Katrakis) returning to Greece after 32 years in the USSR. The father descends from a huge anonymous vessel to an empty quay. ‘It's me,’ he says. Not knowing what to do, Alexandros reaches to take the old man's violin case. ‘Aren't you going to kiss me?’ his father asks. Angelopoulos once again plays a variation on the theme of what it means to be a modern Greek artist living in the shadow of the civil war… Suffused with that peculiar melancholy which Angelopoulos has made entirely his own.” – John Pym, Time Out (London) . 35mm print courtesy Harvard Film Archive. Approx. 122 min.

Part of Theo Angelopoulos’ Trilogy of Silence .

“The beauty of the film has seldom been equaled, and the balance of liquid movement and rocklike human interpretation is both tragic and exhilarating.” – David Thomson, A New Biographical Dictionary of Film

“The film-within-a-film narrative of Voyage to Cythera provides a structural metaphor for a displaced father (who, like Angelopoulos’ long-absent father, is also named Spyros) attempting to rebuild his former life and reconnect with his family, only to find that in the wake of devastating wars, abandoned villages, and commercial development, the idea of home has become a myth.” – Acquarello, Senses of Cinema

“Dispirited by the depoliticisation of Greek society — what he called ‘the silence of history’ — Theo Angelopoulos sets out to contrast the truths inherent in myth and reality in this complex, but always fascinating drama.” – David Parkinson, RadioTimes.com

Theo Angelopoulos’ THE BEEKEEPER

Monday, April 29 6:10

Theo Angelopoulos’ LANDSCAPE IN THE MIST

Monday, April 29 8:30

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• Taxidi sta Kythira (Voyage to Cythera)

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Voyage to Cythera

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Written by Charles Baudelaire and translated by Rachel Hadas. Published in Other Worlds Than This by Rutgers University Press. © 1994 by Rachel Hadas. Originally appeared in Tennessee Quarterly (1994). Used with permission. All rights reserved.

More by this poet

Take it easy, Sadness. Settle down. You asked for evening. Now, it’s come. It’s here. A choking fog has blanketed the town, infecting some with calm, the rest with fear. While the squalid throng of mortals feels the sting of heartless pleasure swinging its barbed knout and finds remorse in slavish partying, take my hand, Sorrow. I will lead you out, away from them. Look as the dead years lurch, in tattered clothes, from heaven’s balconies. From the depths, regret emerges with a grin.

Posthumous Remorse

When you go to sleep, my gloomy beauty, below a black marble monument, when from alcove and manor you are reduced to damp vault and hollow grave;

     when the stone—pressing on your timorous chest and sides already lulled by a charmed indifference—halts your heart from beating, from willing, your feet from their bold adventuring,

     then the tomb, confidant to my infinite dream (since the tomb understands the poet always), through those long nights in which slumber is banished,

Invitation to the Voyage

Child, Sister, think how sweet to go out there and live together! To love at leisure, love and die in that land that resembles you! For me, damp suns in disturbed skies share mysterious charms with your treacherous eyes as they shine through tears.

     There, there’s only order, beauty: abundant, calm, voluptuous.

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Voyage To Cythera (1984)

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Beyond the Raging Sea review – cross-Atlantic rowing race likened to refugees’ ordeal

Two endurance sailors’ perilous voyage is supposed to lead them to empathy for refugees’ plight – but they sure take their time discovering that

H ere is a well-intentioned but brief, unsatisfying and oddly structured documentary, supposedly about refugees and boat people … although the refugees’ experiences are only discussed in the final 10 minutes or so. The film is actually about two Egyptians, Omar Nour and Omar Samra, energetic and prosperous young entrepreneurs who in 2017, in a spirit of adventure, took on the Talisker Whisky Atlantic Challenge, a well-established annual endurance event with a good safety record in which participants journey in a rowing boat across the Atlantic from La Gomera in the Canaries to Antigua; it is a 3,000-nautical-mile, 40-day ordeal in treacherous seas.

After just nine days, these two guys got into terrible difficulties, perhaps as a result of their relative inexperience. Their craft capsized and they had to be dragged out of the water by a Greek cargo ship, a chaotic rescue that itself could have gone fatally wrong. It all sounds very tense, although as the two men are here being interviewed after the event, we know that they survived. So what was the point of this fiasco? Did they put their families and friends through an agony of worry, just for a macho ego trip? Well, around an hour in to this 70-minute film they tell us that they now appreciate the sufferings of boat people and refugees – some of whose testimonies are duly tacked on to the end of the film.

Of course, refugees don’t have what Nour and Samra had: GPS technology, hi-tech comms and safety equipment. And Nour and Samra are not traumatised by poverty and war. Sure, their terrible danger was real enough. But this film’s audience is entitled to ask how exactly their new concern for refugees now manifests itself, apart from a desire to appear in this film. It could be that they are doing all sorts of charity work in this vein, but that’s not mentioned here. Perhaps it might have been better to look more deeply and candidly into Samra and Nour and ask how they have changed.

• Documentary films
• Middle East and north Africa

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Voyage to Cythera (1984)

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Australian Antarctic Division 'struggling' to use $528 million icebreaker for science voyages, review says

When the RSV Nuyina was first launched in 2021, the state-of-the-art vessel was described as a "Disneyland for scientists".

However, an internal review that the federal government initially refused to release has raised questions about whether Australia's only icebreaker is fulfilling its research capabilities.

In addition to its remit of transporting cargo, fuel and personnel to Antarctic stations, the $528 million ship is supposed to provide 60 days a year of dedicated marine science voyages.

But despite completing multiple resupply missions since coming into service, as well as a rescue operation , the Nuyina has yet to conduct a single expedition focused solely on marine science.

A previously scheduled science voyage to the marginal ice zone was cancelled last year because of delays caused by mechanical problems on the vessel.

It means the first research-focused voyage won't occur until early 2025, when scientists take part in a marine campaign at the Denman Glacier .

The dearth of science-based voyages to date is one of several issues raised in a report the federal environment department declined to release to the ABC.

The report, which was marked as "sensitive", was only made public after Liberal senator Jonathon Duniam successfully moved a motion in the Senate ordering the production of documents.

Prepared by the Department of Finance in February, the report said Australia's reliance on one icebreaker to meet multiple demands is leaving some of the ship's capabilities under-utilised.

"The [Australian Antarctic Division] is struggling to allow sufficient time on the ship to deliver marine science," the report stated.

"This is beginning to (and could continue to) raise concerns within the scientific community."

According to the report, discussions with the government were intended to take place regarding "the suitability of a single vessel operating model for AAD".

"Given Antarctic science is an important benefit that government sought from the investment in the RSV Nuyina, there may be a need to consider whether the single vessel model is going to achieve all that is required from government in the Australian Antarctic Program," it stated.

The report does not include comments about whether a second vessel should be considered to overcome the competing demands.

But Senator Duniam told the ABC alternative options should be on the government's radar.

"If we're serious about being a leader in the region — and the region is not just the Indo-Pacific, but also the Southern Ocean and the Antarctic territories — we need to make sure we do have appropriate resources deployed," he said.

"And if it does mean we need to consider an alternative model to supplement the role of the RSV Nuyina, then we should look to that.

"There are a range of measures that could be deployed, including the chartering of vessels for certain periods of time throughout the calendar year when appropriate."

'Significant impact' if risks transpire

The report is based on a review that examined eight focus areas surrounding the vessel, including governance, risk management and readiness for service.

Overall, the report said it "appears probable" the AAD will be able to realise the Nuyina's anticipated benefits.

However, it flagged several issues that could have significant consequences.

"Remaining questions about the resolution of past propulsion system issues, as well as the incomplete commissioning work (especially in relation to science systems) brings the possibility the vessel is unavailable for key roles," it stated.

The report also suggested the private company contracted to operate the vessel, Serco, could face increased crewing costs, and that "AAD may find itself without an operator for the vessel".

It said the AAD was aware of the issues and had plans in place to respond.

"However, if one or several of these [issues] transpired, they would have a significant impact on the government's ability to achieve the benefits expected from the investment," it said.

The report also flagged "infrastructure gaps" in Hobart and at Antarctic stations that were impacting the efficiency and effectiveness of the use of the ship's capabilities.

One of the gaps relates to the wharf where the Nuyina berths at Hobart's Macquarie Point, which is in need of a significant upgrade.

Another issue is that the ship is unable to refuel in Hobart because, due to safety concerns, it has not been given permission to travel under the Tasman Bridge in order to reach a nearby fuel depot.

It means the Nuyina must travel more than 600 kilometres to Burnie in Tasmania's north-west to refuel , adding almost $1 million to the AAD's annual fuel bill.

The review also noted that the Nuyina was "not well designed to support and re-supply Macquarie Island", where the AAD has a research station.

Work underway to address issues: AAD

The AAD said the Nuyina was one of the most complex scientific icebreakers in the world, and that it would serve Australia's interests for the next three decades.

"Over the past 12 months, RSV Nuyina has supported resupply activities at Australia's research stations including, delivering personnel, cargo and equipment," an AAD spokesperson said.

"The Nuyina has also assisted critical Australian Antarctic Program science activities, including sea floor mapping, the Southern Ocean plankton survey, the deployment of whale and krill monitoring devices and support for the Denman Terrestrial Campaign."

The spokesman also said many of the issues raised in the report were being managed effectively.

"The gateway review found the overall delivery confidence for the project to design and build Nuyina was good," they said.

"It also noted that the AAD has completed work, or has work underway to address all issues."

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Voyage to cythera.

1984 ‘Ταξίδι στα Κύθηρα’ Directed by Theo Angelopoulos

An old communist returning to Greece after 32 years in the Soviet Union is disillusioned with the state of things.

Manos Katrakis Mairi Hronopoulou Dionysis Papagiannopoulos Dora Volanaki Giulio Brogi Giorgos Nezos Athinodoros Prousalis Mihalis Giannatos Vasilis Tsaglos Despoina Geroulanou Eirini Koumarianou

Director Director

Theo Angelopoulos

Producers Producers

Theo Angelopoulos Giorgis Samiotis

Writers Writers

Theo Angelopoulos Tonino Guerra Thanassis Valtinos Pierre Baudry

Editor Editor

Giorgos Triandafyllou

Cinematography Cinematography

Giorgos Arvanitis

Composer Composer

Eleni Karaindrou

Sound Sound

Thanassis Arvanitis Dinos Kittou

ZDF Greek Film Centre RAI Channel 4 Television EPT

Greece Germany Italy UK

Primary Language

Greek (modern)

Spoken Languages

English Greek (modern)

Releases by Date

Theatrical limited, 04 may 2023, 21 apr 1984, releases by country.

• Theatrical limited Re-Issue

139 mins   More at IMDb TMDb Report this page

Popular reviews

Review by reibureibu ★★★★½ 16

When someone learns of a past transgression, it doesn't matter how long ago it happened. What are old scars to others are fresh wounds to them, and time reverts itself in revisiting this pain.

During the Greek Civil War, Spyros was exiled to Uzbekistan for being a communist. Over thirty years later he returns to his homeland and finds it both changed yet still the same as it ever was, a country that officially welcomes those of communist ideology yet unofficially rebuffs them at every opportunity; the central conflict revolving around a plot of land that he, despite the choices of everyone else in his family, refuses to sell to make way for a ski resort. "This is my land!" …

Review by Edgar Cochran ✝️ ★★★★½ 10

Nearly unmatched impressionistic poetry. Both the foreground and the background add an infinite visual and thematic depth signaling the Greek auteur's transition from a nation's history to individual history. Foreign elements still pervade both individual and collective psychology and the emotional clashes are embellished with an astonishing lyricism. The central character embraces the incapacity to cope with change as swaying waves of disillusionment and melancholy waterboard the surrounding family member's feelings and the power of authorities over land possession, citizenship and geographical borders are criticized to an extent of alienation that is contrasted with the fates of the people in the haunting final shot. The unequalled poet strikes again.

It managed to surpass Wender's rendition of 1984.

How is silence reflected in this first trilogy entry?

"I often discover, with horror and relief, that I no longer believe in anything. At such times, I return to my body. It's the only thing that reminds me I'm alive."

Review by Sudhakar Kumar ★★★★½

It profoundly addresses the question of the absence of nationality, or even the lack of a homeland in which one can completely identify. It is interesting to note how the collective imagination and the very idea of a nation are gradually being transformed from lead character Spyros perspective, generating a new idea about identity and belonging.

Review by Puffin ★★★★★ 3

The chilling atmosphere signals the end, and the beginning, of something incredibly important. While the situation itself is a bit hazy, the events that transpire are all easy to follow, and are paced and shot brilliantly. Not often does a film feel so conclusive that you feel it consistently throughout, but the shadowy indoor shots, the cloudy outdoor shots, the desperate, bitter, and/or tired characters, it signals something bigger than something really meant to be understood fully. Yes, I do not completely understand the context that creates this situation, but what matters is how the world and its characters react to it.

I insulted Bergman a few times in my review for Hour of the Wolf, and that thought came…

Review by Jonathan White ★★★★★ 18

Lise and Jonnie’s March Around the World 2020

Film #4 - Greece

One of my favourite things about 30 Countries is that it forces me to watch an Angelopoulos. Also, keeping the watches to March Around the World means I can look forward to seeing him again, and stretching out his limited ouvre as long as possible. I chose Voyage to Cythera based, admittedly, on length, as this is Spring Forward daylight savings time day, and we’re a bit tuckered and out of sync, but also it’s the first member of his Trilogy of Silence, and we’ve already seen the last member, Landscapes in the Mist. I was considering the similarly lengthed The Beekeeper, but, the subject matter gave me…

Review by Alexander Walker ★★★★★ 1

How do you cope when almost everything you've known has vanished? When friends have died, homes have been torn down and beliefs have slowly dissolved in time. ' You've got to hang on to something' but what? It's a question faced by Spyros, an elderly man returning to a Greek village after decades in exile. He's someone who rejected his friends, family and idyllic lifestyle to live in the mountains and fight in a bloody civil war. Someone with ' no nationality, no ethnicity, no citizenship.' After thirty two years so much has eroded, yet no one seems to have forgotten or forgiven Spyros' betrayal, leaving indelible scars on the people he left behind, especially his heartbroken wife Katerina. Symbolically…

Review by Hutch ★★★★½ 1

Voyage to Cythera deals with the generational displacement and enduring suffering in the long aftermath of the Greek Civil War. It starts beautifully, though cryptically, before gradually coming into focus with the return of Spyros, an old Civil War fighter, who’s been exiled in Russia for the past 32 years. His reunion with his family is heavy with grief and the irreconcilabilities of time. What’s more, Spyros cannot come to terms with what has become of his country, which has left him behind while he’s been away. 

Theo Angelopoulos films with his characteristic long takes and muted, wintry colours, which work to drain the emotion from his characters’ faces. Spyros, along with his family and his old friends, seem permanently…

Review by Kristian ★★★★ 3

In Voyage to Cythera , The first film in Angelopoulos’ trilogy of silence, Theo delivers another beautifully melancholic poem defined by very moving imagery and sound, yet again highlighting the director’s strength at using audio visual techniques to craft an artistic masterpiece like few can. Mixing history, mythology and philosophy to create a bittersweet yet ultimately moving film.

Contrary to what the title suggests, it is not much of a voyage to Cythera, the birthplace of Venus, the island of love, as it is a voyage to alienation. Voyage to Cythera , much like The Beekeeper, is a film about the lack of acceptance for the present, the inability to grasp it, one that renders the main character as a…

Review by Ziglet_mir ★★★★ 2

Collabin' with the lovely  Irene  again!!! The Angelopoulos journey knows no end! Check out  her review  as well! ________________________

Home is a place, a person, a thing, depending on what has influenced us in our youth. When we are young we have energy and apply that energy to emoting through the world around us because logic is harder to come by. As we age, we are hardened with logic, seeing things anew. Most of the time we are floating on calm waters in a deep fog, embracing the person closest to us. Sometimes we are distant and yearn. But both states require us to gaze into abstraction, upending nostalgia or something we once had and have now forgotten.

Hemingway’s The Old Man and The…

Review by rionnag ★★

❝i often discover with horror and relief that i belive in nothing.❞

Review by RAFIF ★★★★★

They'd Sell The Sky, If They Could"

the ending of this film made me sad, anxious, shocked, and scared I hope that old couple is okay in the middle of the sea :'(

Btw I am so impressed with the scoring in Theo Angelopous films, like in this one, at the beginning of the film, the scoring is very beautiful

Review by Dimitris Stathakios ★★★★★ 1

Theodoros Angelopoulos is one of the greatest directors to have ever lived. He is a true poet of cinema. Voyage to Cythera is one of the most affecting and touching films I have ever seen. Visually stunning and poetic like all the other films by the Greek master, this one is a special film. It is authentic in every way. The cinematography is awe inspiring and the music is fantastic. The performances are all great but Manos Katrakis stands out. Manos was a complete human being and one of the greatest of all Greek actors. His presence is utterly gripping. This is truly one of the greatest performances put to film. The film is meditative, truthful and above all an rewarding experience. Watching an Angelopoulos film is the most complete experience I can imagine. His cinema possesses unmatched artistic value. Voyage to Cythera is one of the greatest films I have ever seen and an instant favourite.

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What Happened When Captain Cook Went Crazy

In “The Wide Wide Sea,” Hampton Sides offers a fuller picture of the British explorer’s final voyage to the Pacific islands.

The English explorer James Cook, circa 1765. Credit... Stock Montage/Getty Images

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By Doug Bock Clark

Doug Bock Clark is the author of “The Last Whalers: Three Years in the Far Pacific with a Courageous Tribe and a Vanishing Way of Life.”

• Published April 9, 2024 Updated April 12, 2024
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THE WIDE WIDE SEA: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook, by Hampton Sides

In January 1779, when the British explorer James Cook sailed into a volcanic bay known by Hawaiians as “the Pathway of the Gods,” he beheld thousands of people seemingly waiting for him on shore. Once he came on land, people prostrated themselves and chanted “Lono,” the name of a Hawaiian deity. Cook was bewildered.

It was as though the European mariner “had stepped into an ancient script for a cosmic pageant he knew nothing about,” Hampton Sides writes in “The Wide Wide Sea,” his propulsive and vivid history of Cook’s third and final voyage across the globe .

As Sides describes the encounter, Cook happened to arrive during a festival honoring Lono, sailing around the island in the same clockwise fashion favored by the god, possibly causing him to be mistaken as the divinity.

Sides, the author of several books on war and exploration, makes a symbolic pageant of his own of Cook’s last voyage, finding in it “a morally complicated tale that has left a lot for modern sensibilities to unravel and critique,” including the “historical seeds” of debates about “Eurocentrism,” “toxic masculinity” and “cultural appropriation.”

Cook’s two earlier global expeditions focused on scientific goals — first to observe the transit of Venus from the Pacific Ocean and then to make sure there was no extra continent in the middle of it. His final voyage, however, was inextricably bound up in colonialism: During the explorer’s second expedition, a young Polynesian man named Mai had persuaded the captain of one of Cook’s ships to bring him to London in the hope of acquiring guns to kill his Pacific islander enemies.

A few years later, George III commissioned Cook to return Mai to Polynesia on the way to searching for an Arctic passage to connect the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. Mai brought along a menagerie of plants and livestock given to him by the king, who hoped that Mai would convert his native islands into simulacra of the English countryside.

“The Wide Wide Sea” is not so much a story of “first contact” as one of Cook reckoning with the fallout of what he and others had wrought in expanding the map of Europe’s power. Retracing parts of his previous voyages while chauffeuring Mai, Cook is forced to confront the fact that his influence on groups he helped “discover” has not been universally positive. Sexually transmitted diseases introduced by his sailors on earlier expeditions have spread. Some Indigenous groups that once welcomed him have become hard bargainers, seeming primarily interested in the Europeans for their iron and trinkets.

Sides writes that Cook “saw himself as an explorer-scientist,” who “tried to follow an ethic of impartial observation born of the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution” and whose “descriptions of Indigenous peoples were tolerant and often quite sympathetic” by “the standards of his time.”

In Hawaii, he had been circling the island in a vain attempt to keep his crew from disembarking, finding lovers and spreading more gonorrhea. And despite the fact that he was ferrying Mai and his guns back to the Pacific, Cook also thought it generally better to avoid “political squabbles” among the civilizations he encountered.

But Cook’s actions on this final journey raised questions about his adherence to impartial observation. He responded to the theft of a single goat by sending his mariners on a multiday rampage to burn whole villages to force its return. His men worried that their captain’s “judgment — and his legendary equanimity — had begun to falter,” Sides writes. As the voyage progressed, Cook became startlingly free with the disciplinary whip on his crew.

“The Wide Wide Sea” presents Cook’s moral collapse as an enigma. Sides cites other historians’ arguments that lingering physical ailments — one suggests he picked up a parasite from some bad fish — might have darkened Cook’s mood. But his journals and ship logs, which dedicate hundreds of thousands of words to oceanic data, offer little to resolve the mystery. “In all those pages we rarely get a glimpse of Cook’s emotional world,” Sides notes, describing the explorer as “a technician, a cyborg, a navigational machine.”

The gaps in Cook’s interior journey stand out because of the incredible job Sides does in bringing to life Cook’s physical journey. New Zealand, Tahiti, Kamchatka, Hawaii and London come alive with you-are-there descriptions of gales, crushing ice packs and gun smoke, the set pieces of exploration and endurance that made these tales so hypnotizing when they first appeared. The earliest major account of Cook’s first Pacific expedition was one of the most popular publications of the 18th century.

But Sides isn’t just interested in retelling an adventure tale. He also wants to present it from a 21st-century point of view. “The Wide Wide Sea” fits neatly into a growing genre that includes David Grann’s “ The Wager ” and Candice Millard’s “ River of the Gods ,” in which famous expeditions, once told as swashbuckling stories of adventure, are recast within the tragic history of colonialism . Sides weaves in oral histories to show how Hawaiians and other Indigenous groups perceived Cook, and strives to bring to life ancient Polynesian cultures just as much as imperial England.

And yet, such modern retellings also force us to ask how different they really are from their predecessors, especially if much of their appeal lies in exactly the same derring-do that enthralled prior audiences. Parts of “The Wide Wide Sea” inevitably echo the storytelling of previous yarns, even if Sides self-consciously critiques them. Just as Cook, in retracing his earlier voyages, became enmeshed in the dubious consequences of his previous expeditions, so, too, does this newest retracing of his story becomes tangled in the historical ironies it seeks to transcend.

In the end, Mai got his guns home and shot his enemies, and the Hawaiians eventually realized that Cook was not a god. After straining their resources to outfit his ships, Cook tried to kidnap the king of Hawaii to force the return of a stolen boat. A confrontation ensued and the explorer was clubbed and stabbed to death, perhaps with a dagger made of a swordfish bill.

The British massacred many Hawaiians with firearms, put heads on poles and burned homes. Once accounts of these exploits reached England, they were multiplied by printing presses and spread across their world-spanning empire. The Hawaiians committed their losses to memory. And though the newest version of Cook’s story includes theirs, it’s still Cook’s story that we are retelling with each new age.

THE WIDE WIDE SEA : Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook, | By Hampton Sides | Doubleday | 408 pp. | $35

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