A strange, muffled emotional charge pervades Pantelis Voulgaris's Goat Dance, a cornerstone of Greek ethnographic documentary: as we watch, step by step, the preparations for the Skyros Carnival, while the islanders dress up in the bizarre costumes that transform them into terrifying, grotesque creatures, half human and half animal, we feel that order is slowly being disrupted - and so much the better. Carnival is a wild time everywhere - the breakdown of order is, after all, its raison d'être - but in Skyros the feast of misrule seems to preserve something of the ancient, pre-Christian Dionysianism that once flourished in the Greek archipelago. Without verbal commentary, the film records, with wonder and awe, the deviation from the norm in which a whole community briefly indulges, conveying something of the festive yet unsettling atmosphere of a spectacle that unites an entire island.
