The Travelling Players (no 26)

by Allan Fish

(Greece 1975 230m) DVD2 (Greece only)

Aka. O Thiassos

The love of Golfo, tragic and profound, deep in your heart will resound

p  Georges Samiotis  d/w  Theo Angelopoulos  ph  Yorgis Arvanitis  ed  Takis Davlopolous, Georges Trianthaphilou  m  Loukianos Kilaidonis  art  Mikes Karapiperis

Eva Kotamanidou (Elektra), Aliki Georgoulis (Elektra’s mother), Statos Pachis (Agamemnon), Maris Vassiliou (Chrissothemis), Petros Zarkadis (Orestes),

Is there any more eclectic, more challenging, more baffling director at work in cinema today than Theodoras Angelopoulos?  People don’t question his position as a cinematic master, no more than they would, say, Rossellini or Fellini, yet the fact is that this is probably the only film of his that I have seen and appreciated as any sort of masterwork; Ulysses Gaze nearly turned me to stone, Eternity and a Day only felt that long, while The Beekeeper, though with a great performance from Marcello Mastroianni, didn’t have the depth many claimed it had.   Though by no means faultless and still rather long, Players remains a spellbinding experience thirty years on, one for which the recent English subtitled Greek DVD was long overdue.

            A small acting troupe arrive in a provincial Greek town in 1952, just prior to the accession of the right wing military government.  In between wandering the streets, their minds wander to the last time they were here, just before the outbreak of World War II.  Then, the director had been arrested and executed at the conspiring of his wife’s lover, and his son realises what he has to do to gain vengeance.  When his sister, Elektra, takes him to see their performance of the play Golfo the Shepherdess, he kills his mother and her lover and runs off into the hills.  He is later captured and shot, but eventually, when one of the players returns, Elektra decides to start the troupe up again.

            There is undoubtedly a classical dimension to the tragedy, with Agamemnon, Elektra and Orestes effectively taking up their mythological namesakes’ baton.  Elektra’s mother may remain nameless throughout, but she is every inch Clytemnestra, and when she finally ‘gets her’s’ we rather rejoice at it.  However, to simply equate Angelpoulus’ masterwork to Greek mythology also misses the very point of the story.  At its heart, Angelopoulus doesn’t seem interested in people.  Or rather, they are not his primary concern.  He seems more interested in how they fit into their landscape, how they move, both physically and figuratively.  Close-ups are an endangered species in this film, his characters moving around as if the entire world was, as Macbeth said, literally a stage.   A stage not ringing to more appropriate wailings from the pages of Euripedes, but one in which the words are accompanied, and overshadowed, by the loudspeakers of the potential political leaders, crying out to let the wannabe dictator protect them from Communism, while neglecting to mention that their autonomous alternative was even worse.  David Thomson was quite right when he said that Angelopoulus’ film could only have existed in the Greek political climate of the time, for it came out perfectly at the time when politics and cinema were going hand-in-hand; when Pasolini was murdered as a sideshow to the premiere of his Saló, and while Alan J.Pakula exploited the paranoiac fears of America in The Parallax View and All the President’s Men. 

            More important to these eyes, however, is its impact on Greek cinema.  At the time, ask most people about Greeks in cinema and it would have been either Anthony Quinn dancing to Theodorakis’ bouzouki or the effervescence of Melina Mercouri.  The crimson curtains of the opening credits should have been indicative of the future rise of Greek cinema, but that old beast Mother Politic prevented it.  So that Players stands alone as a great testament to the time, the people and the director, and its final scene one of the most emotional in all world cinema.  Suffice it to say that, when, upon the recent death of legendary footballer George Best, fans applauded him for a minute rather than stood for a minute’s silence, they didn’t invent that form of respect.  Like Angelopoulos, they were saying “let’s not mourn a death, but celebrate a life.”