For the film Weeping Meadow, Theo Angelopolous built a village only to drown it. The word "village" doesn't quite evoke the immense labor that's everywhere evident in WM: the hand-made bricks, the terra-cotta tiled roofs, the two-story manse at the heart of the village--- the whole sweep of the thing, more than two dozen hand-hewn houses on a vast river-plain.
Every film of course shows evidence of its production costs. What is of interest here is the film-within-the-film that works as an allegory of film's relation to money.
In Welles's Lady from Shanghai, a picnic becomes a film-within-a-film; the three pleasure-cruising characters (the yacht-owner, his wife, and Welles's character, the captain) decide to go ashore for a nighttime picnic. There is shot after shot of local laborers paddling canoes, laying in supplies for the night's party. In the dissymetry between the many laborers and the few picnickers, in the vast quantity of things brought ashore, and all for a few hours' celebration, that picnic is about the industrial production of an entertainment, and the tremendous capital required.
The village in Weeping Meadow is flooded; the villagers flee. (In "artfully aged boats," as my friend E noted, boats whose oars bob uselessly while an underwater tow-rope, the filmmaker's special effect, thinks E, makes the whole flotilla proceed at a uniform, stately, lugubrious pace appropriate to the great sorrows of that troubled nation, Greece.) As they come ashore and build a fire and chant and pray and wave Greek Orthodox icons, the villagers are a perfect mirror-image to the pleasure-banquet of Lady from Shanghai. The bonfire of the refugee villagers, like the banquet, is a kind of film-within-the-film whose every shot evinces "the old curse which undermines the cinema: time is money."
That quotation is from Deleuze, in Cinema 2 (as is the title for this entry). The hinge between the movement-image of Cinema 1 and the time-image of Cinema 2 is money. Deleuze comments on cinema's "curse" just once, to dispense with it right away. Money, says Deleuze, makes its appearance in the film at the moment cinema reflects on its own death; instead of dying, though, cinema's internal relation to money sets up a rising, spinning, ceaseless and dissymmetrical exchange which is foundational for the time-image:
This is the old curse which undermines the cinema: time is money. If it is true that movement maintains a set of exchanges or an equivalence, a symmetry as an invariant, time is by nature the conspiracy of unequal exchange or the impossibility of an equivalence. It is in this sense that it is money; in Marx's formulations, C-M-C is that of equivalence, but M-C-M is that of impossible equivalence or tricked, dissymmetrical exchange... In short, the cinema confronts its internal presupposition, money, and the movement-image makes way for the time-image in one and the same operation... The film is movement, but the film-within-the-film is money, is time.--[Cinema 2, emphasis original, ellipses mine]
It's a beautiful move on Deleuze's part, to not be halted by the worm at the core, but to redeem that evil through the power of the false; the time-money equivalence does not ruin film (or time), but instead launches a dissymmetry in film, an impossibility of equivalence that keeps the time-image spinning.
...I don't know how to get here with what I've constructed, but: Weeping Meadow is a god-awful film. The character Eleni suffers outrage after outrage; war is visited on all the characters as from without. Eleni murmurs over and over, "the uniforms change [but the war goes on]." Apart from a half-hearted nod to trade unions, the film has no political stance, except that parties and armies have ravaged beautiful village life and beautiful villagers like Eleni. The ceaseless parade of outrages visited on Eleni grows unwittingly comical; one begins to wish for the savagery of a Justine, for the humor of The Good Woman of Szechuan.
To end on another tangent: there's a shanty-town in the film Machuca, and I suppose it might have been built for the film. But where Weeping Meadow is all about a tiny lost happiness crushed from without by the immense war, Machuca is micro-political, so that every moment of the Allende government and the putsch that ended it can be seen in the friendship of two schoolboys.