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The cinema as ideal stands as one of the main components of the film Ulysses's gaze by Theo Angelopoulos, since it concerns a filmmaker for whom looking after three old reels of film becomes a reason for living.
In the film, the protagonist bears no name. Andrew Horton (1997) writes that in the script, he was called A: A like the first letter of the alphabet, and the initial of Angelopoulos, which hints at some autobiographical elements that have been woven into the fiction. However, it would be as misleading to speak of autobiography as it would be to say that the spectator is identified with the protagonist. Within the scope of this article it is enough to speak of a convergence, author-character-viewer, that depends on Angelopoulos's peculiar narrative approach.
In this as in his other films, Angelopoulos is developing a sort of imaginary biography that speaks of exile and the sufferings inflicted by impassable frontiers.
We analysts are keen on frontiers. For us the barrier against incest, the limits between self and other, and other differentiations, are steps essential to being human. It should be clear that Angelopoulos is speaking of frontiers in quite another sense: to denounce the frontiers that are instruments of injustice, exclusion and nationalistic hatred.
Ulysses's gaze was made at the end of 1994, at a time when the tragedy in Bosnia was still going on; the date is also the action's ‘present’. Angelopoulos was not able to film in Sarajevo, as he wanted. The making of the film was also marked by personal tragedy: G. M. Volonté died shortly after arriving in Macedonia to participate, in the role that was taken by E. Josephson.
The protagonist, A, then, is an American filmmaker who has come to his native Greece after 35 years of absence with the explicit aim of attending a projection of his films; but he readily admits that this is a pretext. He has heard about two pioneers of the cinema, the Manakis brothers, and about three reels of film, shot at the begin