Theo Angelopoulos - Telegraph His films were mostly episodic, told in the form of a journey in quest of some forgotten person or byway of history. But characterisation was not his strong point. Though he sometimes used international stars, such as Harvey Keitel and Marcello Mastroianni, their roles were generally symbolic. In this respect, the films were in the tradition of Brechtian theatre. This did not make for easy acceptance by the public or the critics, some of whom found his work ponderous and pretentious. They had a point. At his most self-indulgent, he could be grandiose to the point of parody. If he had a sense of humour, he never showed it on screen, with a result that some scenes meant to be profound raised an involuntary smile. A typical example was the moment in Ulysses" Gaze when Harvey Keitel arrives slap in the middle of a Balkan town with shells exploding all round and stops one of the fleeing populace to ask: "Is this Sarajevo?" Theo Angelopoulos was born into an upper-middle-class Athenian family on April 27 1935. He studied Law at the University of Athens between 1953 and 1957 but never took his degree. Instead he was drawn to the arts and began publishing volumes of verse, essays and short stories. After military service he went to Paris and enrolled as a literature student at the Sorbonne - but again did not complete the course, switching to the Institut des Hautes Etudes Cinématographiques (IDHEC), the French film school. Too poor to live in central Paris, he took digs on the outskirts, with a 10-kilometre walk every day to the nearest Métro stop. To finance himself, he worked part-time in a rug merchant's shop. The proprietor took such a shine to him that he wanted to adopt him and went to Athens to ask his mother's permission. She was in favour, but young Theo, seeing a lifetime peddling rugs stretching before him, declined and insisted that he wanted to make movies. His course at the IDHEC came to an abrupt end when he was expelled for defying his teachers on a 16mm film he was making. They told him to use conventional shots and reaction shots, but he ignored them and peppered the film with complex 360-degree pans, in which the camera turned full circle. They told him to pack his bags and "sell his genius back in Greece." He did just that, but not before taking a job at the Musée de l'Homme under the cine-ethnographer Jean Rouch, who pioneered cinéma-vérité. While working there Angelopoulos completed the Kafkaesque 16mm short he had begun at IDHEC, but could not afford to retrieve the film from the labs - so it was never shown. Returning to Greece in 1963, he became film critic of the Left-wing Athens daily Dimokratiki Allaghi, which was closed by the Colonels in 1967 . During this time, Angelopoulos began another short - a semi-documentary called Formix Story (1965), about a pop group - but he lasted only two weeks on the set. According to his version , there were creative differences about the tone of the picture; others claimed he was sacked for being too slow. His third short, The Broadcast (1968), fared better. Influenced by Jean Rouch's 1961 film Chronicle of a Summer, it consisted of cinéma-vérité interviews with passers-by on the subject of their ideal mate. It won a prize at the Thessaloniki Festival. His first feature came two years later. Reconstruction (1970) was shot on location in a remote village in northern Greece on a shoestring budget stumped up by the film's electrician. Based on a newspaper item about a man murdered by his wife and her lover, it had parallels to the myth of Agamemnon's murder by Clytemnestra and Aegisthus. The villagers, mostly played by locals, were used rather like a chorus, while the murder took place off-screen, as it would have done in ancient Greek tragedy. Days of "36 (1972), his next film, was an audacious political allegory attacking the Colonels in the guise of targeting an earlier regime (the rise to power of the dictator Metaxas). It was followed by The Travelling Players (1975), his most ambitious work and generally considered his masterpiece. A huge, sweeping saga, it traced the fortunes of a troupe of mummers performing all over Greece in the 13 years between the fall of Metaxas in 1939 and the election of Alexander Papagos in 1952. This historical background was depicted obliquely as a series of events continually interrupting the actors" performance of the popular pastoral play Golfo the Shepherdess. The plot also borrowed from Euripides, casting Orestes and Elektra as communist sympathisers who assassinate their mother and her fascist lover for engineering their father's death. The film's length taxed some audiences" patience, especially when the leader of the troupe launches into a protracted account of the Greek defeat by the Turks at Sakarya in 1922. But eventually it was a huge success, winning prizes all over Europe . That the film was slipped out under the Colonels" noses was considered a small miracle. In fact, Angelopoulos had submitted a false script, shot the film in remote locations and trusted the local people not to betray him. The third panel in Angelopoulos's modern historical triptych was The Huntsmen (1977). Indirectly it tackled the Civil War period of 1947-49. A shooting party uncovers the frozen body of a partisan dating from 30 years before, and each of them is questioned about his conduct during and since that war. Financed by German television, the film lacked the epic quality of The Travelling Players and was thought to be marred by mannerisms. The closing scene, in which the tone shifts to fantasy as the corpse returns to accuse them, was regarded as an error of judgment. Though Angelopoulos retained a loyal nucleus of critical admirers, his films seldom won popular acclaim. Some were not seen outside the narrow festival circuit. His Alexander the Great (1980), which took the top prize at the Venice Film Festival, was not a biography of the conqueror of the ancient world but a three-and-a-half-hour yarn spun round the modern mythical hero Megalexandros - a superman figure expected to lead his people to freedom. In the film he was depicted as a bandit who turns a socialist commune into a concentration camp and assumes the mantle more of Stalin than of his historical namesake. Angelopoulos intended it as a critique of the cult of personality. Again it had to be financed from abroad (Italian and German television). It met with a mixed reception, international audiences finding it too esoteric, especially as it drew on a little-known incident of 1870 in which a party of British aristocrats was kidnapped and slain by brigands. Other films attracted a similar response. Voyage to Cythera (1984), The Beekeeper (1986, with Marcello Mastroianni), Landscape in the Mist (1989) and The Suspended Step of the Stork (1991, with Jeanne Moreau) trundled through the film festivals of the Eighties to critical applause but public indifference. In Ulysses" Gaze (1995), however, he returned to form with another epic Odyssey drawing together three separate narrative strands: Greek mythology, the plight of the former Yugoslavia and the centenary of cinema. Harvey Keitel was cast as an émigré film director who scours the war-torn Balkans in search of a surviving scrap of film by the brothers Yannakis and Miltos Manakis who, at the dawn of cinema, celebrated everyday life in the region without regard for ethnic and religious distinctions. Allusive and poetic, the film struck a universal chord, contrasting past glories (historical and cinematic) with present tragedy. Three years later Angelopoulos won the Palme d'Or at Cannes for Eternity and a Day, a slow and gloomy study of a poet facing death from cancer, starring the Swiss actor Bruno Ganz. In 2004 Angelopoulos embarked on a new trilogy of films framed around recent events in Greek history. He had completed the first two films in the series, The Weeping Meadow (2004) and The Dust of Time, of which the first won the International Film Critics" Special Award, and was working on the closing chapter in the trilogy when he was knocked over by a motorcycle while crossing a road near Piraeus. He died of his injuries. Theo Angelopoulos married, in 1980, Phoebe Economopolou, who survives him with their three daughters. Theo Angelopoulos, born April 27 1935, died January 24 2012