The Travelling players = O Thiassos [NTSC]

With the release of “The Travelling players” in 1975, Theo Angelopoulos cemented a reputation as one of the leading filmmakers of his generation. Released just after the collapse of the fascist military junta, the film’s international critical success led to a short-lived Renaissance for Greek language cinema. Angelopoulos’s mise-en-scene for “The Travelling players” involves complicated long takes, a concentrated editing and shooting of scenes that allows for the distillation of time and space that is comparable to Tarkosvsky, Welles and Visconti. In “The Travelling players” a small group of thespians travel through Greece performing plays based on Greek history and myth. They become our witness to the modern history of Greece as they take us through the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the tragedies of the two World Wars, the calamities of the Civil War and the resulting political oppression culminating in the establishment of the Junta in 1966 by the Greek military. The “players” find themselves moving across the stage of history itself, and caught in the modern human dilemma of wishing to escape history and consciousness but never able to do so. The film also becomes a mythic investigation of fascism and its destructiveness, and also a passionate, if pessimistic, cry for truth and liberation, that itself echoes with the poisoned chalice of Greece’s democratic history. Angelopoulos makes no concessions to notions of populist or commercially based cinema. “The Travelling players” assumes knowledge of Greek history, both ancient and modern, as well as assuming that it is viewed by a literate audience familiar with modernist conceptions of philosophical and political engagement. For some audiences, “The Travelling players” might be read as elitist and obscure. But for those who decide to commit and engage with the film, its formal experimentations and intellectual concerns, they may find it one of the astounding cinematic experiences. Winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes. In Greek with English subtitles.