Director Theo Angelopoulos

Having just seen one film from the Mediterranean made at the tail-end of a repressive regime and looking back on recent history, I thought I’d try another.

Both films were slow, but The Travelling Players beat The Spirit of the Beehive hands down in that respect. I realised how beautiful and human the latter was as I sat through the chilly scenes of a Greece filmed in grey and beige and inhabited by what seemed like marionettes. (That day’s paper had a feature on holidays in Greece with clichéd azure skies and golden beaches; Angelopoulos drained such scenes of all colour.) The camera was sometimes very, very still and sometimes pensively surveyed its surroundings, looking at everything in turn.

It was a film steeped in Greekness. The troupe’s play was “Golfo the Shepherdess”, a bucolic tragedy performed in traditional dress. The manager was betrayed by his wife’s lover; both the wife and her lover were later killed by her son, Orestes, with the assistance of his sister, Electra. Greece itself was betrayed by the Allies after the first and second world wars (and, implicitly, during the rule by the junta). Fortunately I knew enough Greek history to make some sense of the film, and on three occasions characters broke the fourth wall to give a brief account of, say, the Smyrna catastrophe. The viewpoint was very left wing; the British didn’t come out well from any of these little history lessons, and there was a minor revolt as American music drowned out the Greek accordion at a Greek-American wedding feast.

The style was detached: characters were generally seen in long shot, framed in or dwarfed by their surroundings. The film’s prologue was the accordionist’s prologue from the play. Sometimes the camera lingered on a street while the years moved forwards or backwards: thus 1952 became 1939 without a scene change. Often I had the impression of a stage set – particularly for the civil war scenes of street fighting, where opposing groups of fighters advanced and retreated across the “stage” like gangs of rod puppets or shadow puppets (Karaghiozis?). There were repetitions on a theme: Golfo’s fear of the shadow of a man had echoes in several scenes of shadowy figures seen to one side. I found no humour or lightness, but there was a surreal quality at times – the snowy hen hunt, for example – which might have passed for humour. The film’s beginning was its ending: the reformed troupe arrives once again in Aegio after 13 years.

Everyone agrees that the film is a masterpiece, so I shan’t demur. I found it austere and unyielding, like the gaze of the military busts you find in Greek town and village squares – but interesting withal. I created my own pleasure in lapping up what had once been such familiar sights to me: whitewashed stone buildings, double wooden doors, terracotta roofs and akroteria, periptera, ankle-twisting pavements, painted signs, railway station architecture . . . oh, everything.