Theo Angelopoulos , NYtimes By MARGALIT FOX

Theo Angelopoulos, a renowned director whose films explored the human condition in general and the condition of modern Greece in particular through haunting imagery rooted in myth and epic, died on Tuesday of injuries suffered in a traffic accident near Piraeus, Greece. He was 76.

Christophe Simon/Agence France-Presse Mr. Angelopoulos was struck by a motorcycle earlier that day while crossing the street, police and hospital officials told The Associated Press. He was on location near Piraeus, the port of Athens. The driver of the motorcycle, who was injured in the accident, was later identified as an off-duty police officer. Possessed of a singular style that has long divided critics, Mr. Angelopoulos was considered one of the most eminent directors of the second half of the 20th century; reviewers have likened his films to those of Michelangelo Antonioni and Akira Kurosawa. He worked with some of the world’s leading actors, among them Marcello Mastroianni, Harvey Keitel, Willem Dafoe, Bruno Ganz and Jeanne Moreau. His best-known pictures include “Eternity and a Day,” which won the Palme d’Or, the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival, in 1998. A rumination on death, it stars Mr. Ganz as a terminally ill writer who journeys in search of answers to vast metaphysical questions. If Mr. Angelopoulos’s work was not universally known in the United States, the explanation could be found in his style, the antithesis of Hollywood studio fare. Seen most often here on the art house circuit, his movies are dreamy, atmospheric and enigmatic. Many are allegories that illuminate the painful history of 20th-century Greece, from its occupation by the Nazis in World War II to its brutal civil war in the late 1940s. Visually evocative, often beautiful, his films contain long sections with little or no dialogue. They are suffused with melancholy symbolism, all of it intensely personal and some of it intensely obscure. They are typically organized around very long takes that can assume the form of wordless meditations on space, as the camera pans slowly across a landscape. What dialogue there is can border on the opaque, at least in English translation. In “Ulysses’ Gaze” (1995), for instance, Mr. Keitel, playing a Greek-American filmmaker on an odyssey in the Balkans in search of lost reels of an early Greek film, utters lines like “Your image, still damp, unchanged since the day I left it, emerges once again from the night.” The most distinguishing hallmark of Mr. Angelopoulos’s work is his tendency to play fast and loose — or, more precisely, slow and loose — with time: scenes can unfold with dreamlike nonlinearity, with remembered scraps of a character’s past played out as though they were part of the present action. Some critics adored Mr. Angelopoulos’s films. Others could scarcely abide them. Which side one came down on depended partly on staying power: some of his pictures were three hours long or more. In short, what Mr. Angelopoulos strived for, as he made clear in interviews and in his work, was nothing less than a distillation of the Greek epic tradition on celluloid. Perhaps it was only fitting, then, that Mr. Angelopoulos, who by all accounts had a robust sense of his own artistic merit, was guilty on at least one occasion of the storied Greek sin of hubris. In 1995, he displayed a memorable lack of politesse on being awarded the Grand Jury Prize — second prize — at Cannes for “Ulysses’ Gaze.” The Sydney Morning Herald described what happened after his name was called: “The director caused a storm when the award was announced, remaining for some seconds in his seat, clearly enraged, his fingertips steepled tightly at his lips. Once on stage, his anger was undisguised. ‘I planned my speech for the Palme d’Or,’ he said, before adding contemptuously, ‘but now I’ve forgotten it.’ ” Theodoros Angelopoulos was born in Athens in 1935. As a young man he studied law but, finding it dull, left school and moved to Paris, where he ostensibly studied philosophy but actually spent most of his time at the Cinémathèque Française. He attended France’s chief film school, the Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques, before returning to Greece, where he worked as a newspaper film critic before embarking on his directorial career. Mr. Angelopoulos’s survivors include his wife and frequent producer, Phoebe Economopoulos, and three daughters. Information on other survivors was not available. His other films include “Landscape in the Mist” (1988), which explores the ravages of modern Greece through the story of siblings roaming Europe in search of their father; “The Weeping Meadow” (2004), which treats Greek history between the world wars and was the first segment of an unfinished trilogy; and “The Dust of Time” (2008), the trilogy’s second segment, about the fates of refugees from Greece, starring Mr. Dafoe, Mr. Ganz and Irene Jacob. At his death, Mr. Angelopoulos was filming “The Other Sea,” about immigration and the crisis in contemporary Greece. As he explained in interviews, it was the combination of a centuries-old oral tradition and a 20th-century visual medium that let him capture, for better and sometimes for worse, the soul of his homeland. “I say to myself that I could have made a career anywhere, but I have chosen to speak in the same words that were spoken by so many who preceded me,” Mr. Angelopoulos told The Los Angeles Times in 1999. “Greece is more than a geographical locale to me. It’s a spirit, a culture, and when I’m disgusted with present-day Greece — the loss of spirituality and generosity — I go back to those words said many, many years ago.”