The Theo Angelopoulos Collection: Volume 1 DVD

Contains Angelopoulos's first four films: Reconstruction (1970), Days of '36 (1972), The Travelling Players (1975) and The Hunters (1977). Evidence of a modern master, says David Parkinson.

Theo Angelopoulos is one of the overlooked masters of modern cinema. A former critic, he trained at the famous IDHEC school in Paris, where he was profoundly influenced by the great film anthropologist Jean Rouch. His sombre, intellectually rigorous amalgamations of myth and history often adopt a Brechtian approach to narrative structure along with the meditative long-take visual style of Antonioni and Jancsó. But Angelopoulos also attained a distinctive voice that alarmed the Greek authorities and earned him an international arthouse following. This first volume of three collects his first four films.

In his debut feature, Reconstruction (1970), Angelopoulos considers the collapse of the traditional rural community and its social and economic consequences. While he draws on a true story, Angelopoulos (who also plays a TV reporter) is less interested in the fact that a worker returning from Germany is murdered by his wife and her gamekeeper lover, than in the dereliction of a shared history symbolised by the couple turning against each other under interrogation.

This individual and collective refusal to take responsibility is revisited in Days of ‘36 (1972), as the assassin of a prominent trade unionist takes a conservative MP hostage and the government prevaricates over tactics so as not to alienate potential political allies. But this intense denunciation of weak leadership is dwarfed by the epic masterpiece, The Travelling Players (1975), which employs an achronological structure and a bold mix of tableaux, monologues, slogans and songs to emphasise the fragmentation of Greece in the face of such momentous events as the pro-monarchy Metaxas dictatorship, the Nazi occupation, the Civil War and restoration of democracy.

This magisterial treatise on collective memory finds echo in The Hunters (1977). This later film points accusing fingers at those who benefited from the defeat of the Communists in 1949 by forcing the bourgeois conformists who discover the corpse of a frozen partisan to reflect on their deeds. Bristling with judicious anger and audacious theatricality, it is challenging but compelling filmmaking.

David Parkinson on 18th October 2011
Author of 193 reviews