O Thiassos

Time travel, odyssey, chronicle: a troupe of actors travels through Greece from 1939 to 1952. They play the same folk play over and over, with radical political cataclysms pervading the cinematic present: In 1939, the fascist Metaxas dictatorship; in 1944, partisan uprisings against the German occupiers’ reign of terror; and in 1952, the aftershocks of the crushed communist uprising. Angelopoulos draws a social microcosm marked by historical upheavals with his travelling players, and with his draft of history he draws their collective memory. (mg)