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

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.