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Apart
from the distinctive American and Russian traditions of
the ‘hunger and thirst’ theme, a striking example occurs
in Angelopoulos’s first international success. Spanning
fifteen years of Greek history, the film’s core is the
misery of World War II and its aftermath. One remarkable
scene sums up the the wartime experience of famine. The
starving actors close in slowly on a solitary chicken seen
on a snow-covered slope: as the New York Times
critic wrote: Angelopoulos ‘ has filmed hunger.’
Angelopoulos,
born in Athens in 1936, is a film-maker who refuses
compromise. The slow pace and austere style of his work
are utterly against current trends, and the content is
invariably as formidably intellectual as it is emotional
and poetic. He is, to put it bluntly, not everybody’s idea
of a good night out. At his best, however, he is
unquestionably a master. And only the fact that he so
obviously knows it renders that fact unsympathetic.
Now finally invested with the Palme d’Or at Cannes – a
prize he has coveted for years, even to the extent of
making a churlish speech when he was offered the
runner’s-up award – Angelopoulos seems content to allow
history to judge his work. It will certainly judge The
Travelling Players (O Thiassos) a classic.
It was filmed in Greece in 1974, at no small risk,
under the hard-line rule of the Greek colonels’ junta. Why
the military police who watched its progress allowed it to
be completed is a mystery, since the film clearly examines
the turbulent history of its country of origin from a
radical Brechtian point of view. Perhaps the colonels’ men
thought that this story of a troupe of itinerant actors
touring Golfo the Shepherdess, a pastoral folk drama set
to music and song, was harmless enough. But it wasn’t,
since the period in which it is set (1939 to 1952) warmed
the seeds of their masters’ military coup.
Almost four hours long, The Travelling Players has its
actors first watch and then get caught up in the political
events of the period, so that even the play changes its
emphasis. As they progress through the often rainy and
wintry provincial Greece in which Angelopoulos usually
prefers to shoot, the sequences become longer and longer
and the pace seldom changes. The whole film is
accomplished in around 80 shots.
But despite that, and even though no one but a Greek
can understand all the political, historical and mythic
allusions, it is a fascinating progress, enlivened by
Yorgos Arvanitis’s often luminous photography, Loukianos
Kilaidonis’s throbbing music, including songs and dances
adapted from folk sources, and performances that seem
utterly truthful.
by Derek Malcolm (with preface by Ian Christie)
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