BootDigest Such a frustrating disappointment

SnoReptilePlenty Memorable, crazy movie

Kien Navarro Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

Juana what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Jackson Booth-Millard I would not have known about this Greek film if it had not been featured in the book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, it was rated well by critics as well, so I hoped it was worth it, directed by Theodoros Angelopoulos (Landscape in the Mist). Basically a group/troupe of travelling players, i.e. stage performers, travel through Greece attempting to perform the popular erotic drama Golfo the Shepherdess. The film is a trawl through historical events between 1939 and 1952, as experienced by the travelling players, these events affect all villages they visit, hence the performance of the play is not always successful or completed. The historical events seen are the last year of the dictatorship of fascist prime minister Ioannis Metaxas, the war between Greece and the Italians, the occupation of the Nazis, the liberation, the civil war between left and right wingers and the intervention of Greek politics by the British and the Americans. The film is also seeing the lives of the characters themselves, with jealousy and betrayal more, this includes Aegisthus (Vangelis Kazan) is an informer and collaborator working with German occupiers, and Orestes (Petros Zarkadis) fighting with the leftists, avenges the death of his father by killing his mother and Aegisthus, he is arrested for guerrilla activities and executed in prison. Orestes's sister Elektra (Eva Kotamanidou) helps the leftists and aids her brother in his vengeance, after his death he continues the work of the troupe and her relationship with Pyladis (Kiriakos Katrivanos), Elektra's younger sister Chrysothemis (Maria Vassiliou) collaborates with the Germans, becomes a prostitute during the occupation, during the liberation sides with the British, and later marries an American. Orestes's close friend Pyladis is a communist exiled by the regime of Metamax, he joins the guerrillas and gets arrested and is exiled again, finally after being tortured he is forced to sign a denunciation of the left by the right wing and he is released from prison a few years later. Also starring Stratos Pachis as Agamemnon, Aliki Georgouli as Elektra's Mother, Stratos Pahis as Elektra's Father, Giannis Fyrios as Accordionist and Grigoris Evangelatos as Poet. To be honest, most of the description above is not written by me, it was for me a rather complicated film, I got the parts of the players trying to perform their play while history goes on in the background, and some of the character stories caught my attention a little, but there were loads of slow moments with no dialogue and not much action, critics are right when they said you need patience to watch this film, I don't think I had enough for it, especially it being almost four hours long, but it's not a bad epic political drama. Worth watching!

Cosmoeticadotcom The outline of the film is that in 1952, the players debark and look back upon the prior thirteen years of their nation's turmoil. The film then shifts back to 1939, and proceeds in a straight chronological fashion back to 1951. The players, who may or may not be related by blood, are a mixed lot of old and young, male and female. Early on, the young males join the Communist Party to first fight off the Nazi Occupation, and then battle the Nationalist Greek government. Yet, we barely see them throughout the rest of the film. No single actor dominates and all are fairly anonymous (which is why giving the names of the characters (the few one might be able to discern) and the actors is pointless; although, at three points in the film, characters break the fourth wall to speak directly to the audience in soliloquies. The first is when an old player talks on a train about his experiences battling the Turks in the 1920s. The most jarring- and least effective- is when a raped woman turns her suffering into a diatribe on the rape of Greece by outside forces. The final one is when a prisoner of war returns home to describe his torture, including the Sisyphan task of moving rocks up hills, only to move them back down. This usage, however, only emphasizes the fact that they are not real individuals, but a literal Greek Chorus, commenting on the history that passes them by, for never do they really participate. They are almost always passive observers. This is most starkly represented when we see the players scurrying in the dark foreground of a street battle between Communists and Nationalists in a lighted background. Both parties advance and retreat in a highly choreographed, symbolic, and beautiful way. Yet, never do the players take sides in the historical drama. Another scene where this is made clear is when the players are stopped by British forces who make them perform their pastoral play, called Golfo The Shepherdess, on a beach- the only time we see the troupe get to perform it to its completion, for, before that, is always interrupted, but not in the humorous manner it would be in a Fellini film. When stopped, one of the older male players pleads for mercy to the British that they are not Communists. The scene ends with the Brits and players dancing together to an accordion version of It's a Long Way To Tipperary, only to end with a gunshot piercing and killing one of the young British soldiers, who falls to his death in the sand.The transfer of the Region 2 DVD, from the Greek company New Star, is better than the version of Days Of '36 that they released. It is nearly pristine. There are no extra features to speak of, save for colored subtitles which allow for easier reading. The film is in a 4:3 aspect ratio. The scoring by Loukianos Kilaidonis rarely is extra-diagetic. Most of the music ushers forth from the characters and their natural surroundings, which only adds to the Symbolic quality of the film. The screenplay by Angelopoulos alone, is a damned good one, as described above. The only flaw being its length, one wonders if a more experienced (at that time) screenwriter could have convinced Angelopoulos to trim the script and film down into unequivocal greatness.The cinematography, by longtime Angelopoulos collaborator, Giorgos Arvanitis, is superlative. There are scenes in the real world that feel otherworldly, and there are scenes that are symbolic that look real. Arvanitis makes beauty out of grubby alleys, twisted garbage and debris, and evokes emotions with long dolly shots, often looking away from the seeming main action of a scene to focus on a seemingly minor thing. He also will have the camera linger on a character's reaction to something, without showing us the thing, or showing it only later than expected. There are also very few sunny shots in this film. In fact, the whole Angelopoulos canon has few shots that are sunny in it. Hibernal dawns and dusks, earth tones, and cool blues, abound. The man seems to relish the hues, real and psychological, that are evoked by overcast skies. It is also claimed that the whole 222 minutes of the film is wrought with less than a hundred individual shots- a remarkable show of formal patience, and trust in the images and audience's appreciation for them, on the part of the director.The Travelling Players should also be commended for not falling into the trap of caricaturization, which often happens with clumsily deployed symbolism. No group- not Nazis nor Communists, British nor Italians, Nationalists nor Americans, are shown as without blame in the Greek situation. This is because the film, despite its abundant use of political symbols, is definitely not a political film, but a Symbolic one. The Symbolism dominates the political content for the focus is on illustrating human behavior in extremis; a condition brought about by the politics of the time. But, it could just as easily have been brought about by religious oppression, natural disasters, or disease. A final point about this remarkable and daring film is that, despite its length, and despite its deployment of Symbols, it is, unlike the films of David Lean, definitely not an epic. In fact, the film deliberately miniaturizes history into the small moments, a collage of indignities, that define the lives of the players, and in that miniaturization, it maximizes the human experience for its audience. How many films, great or not, can stake that claim?

d-apergis O Thiasos is one of those cerebral and omphaloskeptic movies that just do not happen anymore, shamelessly demanding from the viewer to attune to its eccentric pace. Space and time become pawns in the director's hands, who in effect accomplishes their operatic tranquility in contrast to the static directorial style. In rejecting all conventions of academic narrativity it sustains its formulaic enigma throughout its considerable length, persistently (and obsessively) questioning the freedom of man in a world domineered by irreversible occurrences. Boosted equally by grandeur, mystifying symbolism and pictorial lyricism the film comes to its redeeming conclusion. Enchanting, liberating, revolutionary, focused and precise. Both coldly objective and passionately subjective. A rare masterpiece.

tintin-23 Angelopoulos began developing his theories about film making in 1962, while studying at the IDHEC in Paris. His quest for a genuinely national Greek cinema had been preceded by a similar movement among Greek musicians. This was partly in reaction to the growing American military and economic influence in the Mediterranean, and partly in reaction to the American support of the Greek junta. At that time, Hollywood dominated the world's screens, and for Angelopoulos, the natural battlefield was the cinema. His style eschews mainstream conventions of the time, resulting in his films being perceived as nearly the antithesis of Hollywood's films. Hollywood's rapid cuts and furious pacing he opposes through long takes, leisurely pacing, and composed tableaux. Angelopoulos uses long shots, and de-emphasizes individual performances, unlike Hollywood's close-ups and star system. Hollywood tries to emotionally seduce its audience, while Angelopoulos looks for means to occasionally distance his viewers from their emotional responses. Of course, just reversing Hollywood's techniques cannot in itself constitute a style, but it seemed at the time to have been a good place to start to define a national cinema.The camera of Georges Arvantis has been crucial in all of Angelopoulos' films, and "The Travelling Players" is no exception. Two-thirds of the film consists of exterior shots in subtle, subdued colors, recorded in the drab light of wintry dawns and dusks. The film is shot almost entirely in long shots that are also long takes, many lasting several minutes, and some as long as seven to nine minutes. The retelling of these thirteen years of history, covered in 240 minutes, required only eighty scenes or takes. On several occasions, during some long takes, there is a shift in time, which is meant to underscore the political linkage between the pre- and post-war military regimes. At other times, objects or characters come into the camera's restricted field of view , somewhat poorly framed, and even unpredictably at times, while outside sounds, near or far away, remind the viewer of the existence of an outside, unseen world. Sometimes, the camera searches a rural landscape, a courtyard, a back alley, in a 360-degree pan. The viewer is invited to share in the search, in what to look for, and for how long, and maybe return to the original place for a second look. Many of these long takes with little action in them often follow moments of intense emotion. They become, in fact, resting points where the viewer can reflect on the dramatic event he or she has just witnessed. There are three particular long takes, in full shots, with the camera immobile, during which three of the main characters, Agamemnon, Electra, and Pylades, each in turn recount key moments in the history of their country. During these monologues, the actors speak monotonously, without inflection or emotion. But other than these three instances when history becomes intimate through the testimonials of the three characters, history is observed from a distance, without fanfare, without insightful dialogue.There are no stars in this film. Although Orestes is certainly an important character, and the second half of the film is Electra's story even more than Orestes', the true protagonist is the group of players itself. As time passes, the group membership changes, but the group itself survives as a living character.This film is composed as a mosaic of scenes rather than an ordered narrative as Angelopoulos switches back and forth in time and from one character to another. Using these distancing devices is one of the ways by which Angelopoulos forces the audience to reflect on the broader themes, rather than just the individual participants and moments."The Travelling Players" is a meditation on history and myth. In this film, Angelopoulos examines the political power elite, monarchist-fascist, supported by foreign powers that had obstructed Greek democracy since at least 1936. This is a continuation of his investigation, which began with "Days of '36" (1972), and would continue with "Megalexandros" (1979). Angelopoulos' views contradict the "official" Greek history and constitute a fundamental revision of history in which the Left, in general, and the Communist Party of Greece in particular, are given their proper places, and are not depicted as the moral threat to Greek democracy. Angelopoulos' main arguments for this revision have to do with the nature of the Greek resistance to the German occupation and the civil war which followed.In this representation, Greece is no longer the Greece of the travel brochures, with its eternal sunshine and beautiful islands. Instead of the "travel poster" Greece, Arvantis' camera shows us a land with its scruffy homes, rundown "kafeneons," crumbling stone walls, and rutted streets. Greece is no longer the cradle of western democracy, but a place where tyranny is deeply-rooted, and its enchanted islands are places of detention, torture and executions. Greece is a land possessed by Hunger and Death.On a mythological level, the characters play out a modern version of the myth of the House of Atreus. As it is in Aeschylus' Agamemnon, betrayal is a major theme of the film, betrayal on a personal level by some members of the troupe. But on the contemporary historical level, the betrayal is that of Greece, from outside by other nations, but even more tragically, from within itself. Through this parallel Angelopoulos unambiguously suggests the repetitive cyclical nature of human existence.On the other hand, since Aeschylus's Oresteia also relates the birth of Athenian democracy, it is from this lesson that Angelopoulos, continuing the lesson of Aeschylus, thematically links individual tragedy to the national struggle for freedom."The Travelling Players" is a powerful historical epic, if not an unusual one, as far as American audiences' expectations are concerned. I would certainly discourage seeing this as a first exposure to Angelopoulos' films. For those who appreciate Angelopoulos' work, it is one of his finest works, worthy of several viewings.