At the very end, "A" (Keitel) is crying over the death of his friends in Sarajevo and staring at a blank movie screen. Does the blank screen imply that the films he has been searching for were unable to be developed? That his whole mission has failed??
shareGod, I wish I knew. It's been awhile since I saw the film. I took it to mean that the suffering he had seen was too strong for the film itself to even register for him anymore, but you might also be right.
I wish you had been around when I watched this, the board was ridiculously empty back then.
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Yes. But there may more to it than that.
Around the 40 minute mark, A. is on the train telling the story about how he took some Polaroids at the reputed birthplace of Apollo. But the pictures came out blank, "blank negative pictures of the world. As if my gaze wasn't working." He says he hoped this project, to recover the three reels, would be a way out of this impasse or failure. So his mission has failed, but you're meant to remember this earlier event.
At the 2 hour and 20 minute mark, S., the film curator, played by Josephson, shows him the film that he has recovered, tells him that he's found the reels, shows them to A., and says they'll take a few hours to dry. Immediately afterwards, he starts talking about how fog enshrouds Sarajevo. There's meant to be a connection between the shooting of S. and his family in the foggy landscape, and the failure of A. to recover the film.
The film itself may, I think, be connected to the recurring image in Angelopoulos's films of landscapes in fog.
i always thought the film was blank to imply that the time of 'innocence' and 'unity' never existed and was basically a romantic illusion. If the film is the key to 'lost innocence', so to speak, and gives the protagonist hope that all the wounds of time can be healed through their discovery, or at least with the potential to heal, then it makes sense to interpret the blank screen this way.
it's perhaps instructive to consider Angelopoulos comment regarding one of the main themes of the film--the ability of cinema to record and therefore reproduce historical truth--and that was something about the gaze of the camera not being as 'innocent' as he once thought it was.
«Every filmmaker remembers the first time he looked through the viewfinder of a camera. It is a moment which is not so much the discovery of cinema but the discovery of the world. But there comes a moment when the filmmaker begins to doubt his own capacity to see things, when he no longer knows if his gaze is right and innocent.»