La recita

We watch movies to forget the true banality of life. Movies are packed with witty, non-stop dialogue, head-spinning action which takes place in a short period of time, and, of course, beautiful, drop-dead gorgeous women. We are so conditioned by contemporary movies, we forget or want to forget ordinarily life.

The Traveling Players by Angelopoulos has none of this. The dialogue is ordinary, spoken by ordinary people, by ordinary men and women. When they speak it is not rapid-fire, non-stop delivery, but ordinary speech most times separated by long periods of silence.

The beauty of The Traveling Players - or any film by Angelopoulos - the ordinary is beautiful. The sweeping, long scenes in this movie are stunning. We quickly identify with one or more of the traveling players. In the dialogue we can hear words spoken by a close friend or acquaintance. When the film ends nearly four hours later, you will want to see more.

This movie should not be missed.

Theo Angelopoulos is one of the acknowledged masters of cinema, and yet he remains little seen: an acquired taste. It is easy to see why. Unlike other greats, like, say, Renoir and Mizoguchi, who, though firmly rooted in their own national cultures, present characters and narratives generally recognisable, Angelopoulos is forbiddingly national (as opposed to nationalistic: there are echoes of everyone from Fellini to Bunuel to Ozu in this film) in his outlook. Watching this film without any knowledge of Greek history, literature or mythology can be very frustrating - every time you see a character, event, composition, you know it alludes to something else, but because you don't know what, you feel like you're missing the point of the film. La Regle Du Jeu is enriched by a deep knowledge of French History, but can be enjoyed by anyone with an interest in cinema, stories or humanity. Angelopoulos' films don't have this surface level of entertainment - everything is symbolic and loaded.

Does this mean that the only enjoyment of the film can be a cold admiration of form? No. Even if we don't understand the specifics, we can recognise the horrors of a nation beset by continual tyranny. The metaphor of a theatrical troupe, travelling throughout Greece, is subtly used. Rather than actors, or commentators on history, as we'd expect, they're always continually observing, on the margins. Modern Greece is a labyrinth - the film is dense with streets, corridors, doors, offering no escape, just an endless loop, leading to dead ends of time and space. Fascism has exploded these notions in its denying of history and its attempt to homogenise space, and the same frame can hold events decades apart.

The travelling players are exiles in their own country. Like Bunuel's discreet diners, they can never finish their play: when they do it results in death, stagnation, and a break up of the troupe. They're bewildered like Pirandello's Six Characters, not necessarily searching for an author (they have one - Greek history), but trying to escape him. The great irony is that they cannot remain untainted by the times - one's son is a partisan, another is an informer.

Angelopoulos' use of the medium really does inspire awe. His slow, long takes, long-shot compositions and camera movements, open the mind to new conceptions of time and space, forbidden by the ideologies ruling Greece. The film is full of remarkable, shocking set-pieces; austere quiet bursting into Fellini-esque disruption; revels and song turning into murder and horror; editing so spare that each cut becomes a jolt. Songs, birds and water are the driving metaphors here: how fascism appropriates our minds, imagination and especially our voice; how our reaching for freedom is always curtailed; how history is a never-changing trampling on the vulnerable.

Angelopoulos is a modernist - he still believes in the power of witness, and the ability to assert truth, which is refreshing in these times where irony is confused with indifference. Compare THE TRAVELLING PLAYERS with Nabokov's Bend Sinister, similarly concerned with artists in a totalitarian system. Angelopoulos' systematic attempt to shore fragments against the ruins is denied by Nabokov, who bleakly suggests through fragmentation, distortion and disrupton that there is no shoring, that the only plausible rebellion is madness. Angelopoulos' view is, in many ways, more reassuring.

The film is not without its problems - a raped woman stands up to recite the rape of Greece in a queasy monologue; hateful royalists are coded homosexual to suggest sterility and death; there is, at times, a humourless self-righteousness and portentousness to the film that grates. But, before he slipped into the vague artiness of his later works, its astonishing to think that people could make films like this. In the way that you may not hold Finnegan's Wake or the Sistine Chapel to your heart, THE TRAVELLING PLAYERS is unloveable, but it's a rare experience in the cinema of the sublime. (And, believe me, once you've attuned yourself to Angelopoulos' rhythm, you won't want those four hours to end)

"The Travelling Players", one of the early films of Theo Angelopoulos, shows the vast difference between the talented rising director of 1975 that had something to say, and of the bourgeois famous director of 1998 ("Eternity And A Day") that won the Cannes award but had nothing left to say.

A sprawling epic running at around 4 hours, the film follows a group of touring actors performing a theatrical play across Greece between 1939 and 1952. The focus is on the troubled modern history of Greece during the period (a fascist dictatorship, resistance against the Italians, German occupation, civil war), seen through a series of warped desolate sequences drenched in languor, and also an apotheosis of traditional folklore, music, theater, rural and urban landscapes. Most of these scenes exhibit a rare poetical sensibility, while a few are a bit clumsy, but still interesting.

Couple that with the drama that unfolds within the group of players, and you've got a true masterpiece. Basically what we see is a loose adaptation of Aeschylus' ancient tragedy "Oresteia" (the father Agamemnon, the adulterous mother Clytamnestra, her lover Aegisthus, the avenging daughter Elektra, the avenging son Orestes etc). In the end, the group of actors stands severely rearranged through a painful and dividing historical period, shadows of themselves in a shadow of a country. The film ends as a perfect circle just the way it began, a metaphor for life itself.

This was a long Angelopoulos war movie...

Necessary to underline the long battle of the country to preserve its roots in a time of transition and also to show its slow resolve. In its first half the identity of the country stays in its actors that, during a war, are still trying to entertain with subversive messages but also make a living. They are the resistance, keeping the past alive through the folklore plays, keeping the culture alive in these times filled with turmoil.

Actors are like soldiers in the first half and are fighting the nazis with folklore ideology and metaphors. When one is captured or killed the ones that remain have to fight even harder, but still smartly, low-key. In the second half we have the same but the actors on the other side have changed, with different ideologies but who also want one thing - to eradicate the culture that was there originally and replace it by force with a foreign one. There were two forces who fought for the soul of Greece, the communists (Russia) and the imperialists (UK). All the while, its people, being split, are trying to keep the soul alive. Fundamentals of a war, after all.

All of these big-picture events have a small-picture effect on its citizens, the theatre troupe, in this case, where the changing of generations and mentality takes place...also by force.

It's a long one, one that has to interest you to keep you engaged because Theo's style are these sweeping shots, long takes, silent scenes where nothing much is happening but volumes are written about the meaning.

A flawed masterpiece from Angelopoulos, the first of a number of great films of his you can pick at if you want.

First and foremost, it is a technical achievement; almost 4 hours and only about 80 cuts! It goes against all we've gotten used to in film story-telling, and does it brilliantly.

The story follows a troupe of actors back and forth through the years 1939 to 1952. They're thrown about by the violent, sometimes absurd tides of Greek history, with victory over the Nazi's giving way to the rise of local fascists at home.

The film is very Brechtian and distanced in style. We hardly get to know the characters at all, despite the running time. It's much more interested in the great tides of politics and time than individuals - which is both its strength and its weakness. I was always interested, sometimes horrified, but rarely touched emotionally. Also, some of the good/bad of the politics felt simplistic.

That said, despite its length, I will re-watch it. I suspect I'll appreciate the amazing scope of it's vision and the bravery of it's style even more without expecting to get caught up in the people in a conventional way.

If you have the chance, get ahold of the 'New Star' DVD, which was only in release a short time. The transfer was supervised and approved by Angelopoulos, and certainly looks wildly better than the commonly found VHS tape.