Cinema

Travelling players

David Perry Towards the end of 'The Travelling Players' (Academy I from 9 September) one of the acting troupe—Orestes—who has been executed for his communist activities in the Civil War, is buried by some of his colleagues. They take his coffin out to some desolate strand, and as it is lowered into the earth they spontaneously raise their hands above their heads and clap wildly. It is a haunting image to celebrate the death of an actor, and it is desperately moving. Surprisingly so because, throughout the film's four hours, dialogue has been so Sparse that the characters have not really established themselves as individuals—even the names are mythic. Rather, they embody, almost as puppets, the different choices that were open to Greeks during the years of the Civil War—from fascism to revolutionary communism. But this scene is filmed With such restrained compassion, in contrast to the vivid impact of the historical events that precede it, that the effect is Shattering.

What Angelopoulos has done is to present modern Greek history as it affects a group Of travelling players moving from town to Village playing a pastoral folk drama 'Golfo the Shepherdess'. He spans the period from I922—the year of the first expulsion of Greeks from Smyrna in Asia Minor—to 1952 when the strong-arm regime of Papagos came to power and executed the last of the Civil War guerillas—like Orestes. It is in these traumatic years that AngeloPolous believes an understanding of present clay Greece must be sought. Indeed it is something of an obsession for him: he returns here to themes adumbrated in his first two films (though much less successftillY), 'Days of 36' and 'The Reconstruc tion,. , Incredibly, Angelopoulos made his film under the noses of the colonels who recently fell from power. He submitted a false script to the authorities and filmed in different remote locations, trusting to the goodwill of the local people, and the stupidity of .PaPadopoulos's agents. He was also working on a very restricted budget which makes the film's achievement of authenticity remarkable.

The dramatic metaphor which relates the Play 'Golfo' to political reality becomes one of the main devices for presenting the action. °restes's burial scene shows how skilfully Aogelopoulos uses this idea. For here the Perspective is suddenly changed. The Players suddenly become the audience when they applaud, and we realise they have been !II audience of the political events of the throughout the film, as well as players. 'he dramatic metaphor, potentially simplis

tic though it is, takes on all the density of Carne's in 'Les Enfants du Paradis'.

Another device is the modern recreation of the Atridean myth within the company. Orestes and Electra are communist sympathisers who avenge the Aegistheus figure— a fascist who is implicated in their father's execution early in the film. Orestes comes on stage during one of Aegistheus' monologues with a machine gun and with the chilling words 'Shepherd, you talk too much', he shoots him. The audience presumes this to be some sort of quirky updating of the play and clap wildly as the curtain falls—the mythic and dramatic metaphors that govern the film converge in this incident.

But more importantly, the film has developed a slow hypnotic rhythm to match its epic length. When something is about to happen in a room, the camera is there before the incident, and afterwards, exploring the space. If someone walks down a road, the camera tracks, following his every step. It is the same sort of stately, spellbinding effect you get in Tarkovsky's films. To build this sort of rhythm, Angelopoulos uses very long takes and as little editing as possible. There is one sequence shot in a square which begins with a silent band of communist demonstrators walking towatds the camera and then out Of view. The camera pans round to focus on another street leading to the square, and along comes a band of street musicians. When they reach the square the Camera starts to track along beside them, slowly falling behind until they disappear— and then a solitary old man walks across the street as the camera continues to track.

This sort of brilliantly choreographed shot, lasting four or five minutes, is analogous with both Jansco, whom Angelopoulos acknowledges as an influence, and Antonioni in the much discussed hotel sequence towards the end of 'The Passenger'. But whereas Antonioni's shot was conceived and brilliantly executed as a 'tour de force', to be a climax to the film, Angelopoulos builds on this sort of swivelling, tracking shot throughout his film. Much credit is due to his cameraman George Avantis who has been working with him since his first feature.

Some of these long takes include time shifts of several years. Near the beginning of the film, Orestes walks along some railway tracks in soldier's uniform, ready for the war in 1940. When he goes out of shot, the camera lingers and then follows a jeep back in the opposite direction—the jeep is part of the Papagos election campaign of 1952. A slow track of the camera, followed by a lingering pause with nothing particular in frame preceeds a second track back to the original starting point of the shot—this is the visual sign that Angelopoulos uses to indicate a chronological jump.

What he does is to build up a temporal stream of consciousness by using these techniques. The chronological ambiguities of the film are peculiarly apt for dealing with such a politically violent period— remorseless attack and counter-attack. But Angelopolous does not use editing to help build up this pattern. His extreme restraint with this technique is remarkable--although it does cause him a few problems on the mechanical level of simply moving people from A to B fairly quickly.

In 'The Travelling Players', you have the feeling of moving from incident to incident rather than from shot to shot. It is what gives the film its beguiling visual magic—the contrast between this kind of editing and a conventionally edited film is analogous to the contrast between a Byzantine fresco and a perspective painting. In the first case, the eye wanders freely from image to image, incident to incident, without the constraints of time or space imposed by the perspective of later western art. With perspective, the mathematical organisation of the different elements guides the eye into set patterns, just as the montage in a conventional film gives certain guidelines which Angelopoulos deliberately denies the viewer.

The film is visually impressive in another way. Angelopoulos has a powerful feeling for Greek landscape. But the Greece he presents is a Greece of corrugated iron, of derelict railway lines running along the shore, often shot in sleet or rain: an astringent antidote to the more familiar rich charms of olive grove, white sand and sun. Characteristically, the action is set in shabby provincial towns whose stagnation is echoed by the flaking facades of buildings round the squares. The film opens in one of the ancient, sprawling, half-plaster, halfwood hotels that can still be found in such places. Angelopoulos has chosen his locations with scrupulous care, all over Greece. The predominant tone is sombre, but there is always a faint promise of the beauties of rural Greece breaking through—the soft shape of a blue promontory in the distance against the sea; or the watery sun filtering through driving winter cloud.

The unsentimental filming of the landscape of actuality is throughout brilliantly juxtaposed with the painted landscape of the Players' backdrop—mountains, sheep and sky with a river—rendered in a naïve style like that of the Greek painter Theophilos. This is the pastoral landscape of rural Greece, but absurdly stylised and already anachronistic, a point emphasised by filming it flapping against the sky during an improvised performance on a beach.

The acting of the players is similarly stylised, large in gesture and simple in conception as you expect of a folk drama tradition transposed to the crowded cafes and halls of Greek small towns. And Angelopoulos's camera echoes this style by adopting invariably a fixed frontal perspective whenever filming a performance. The impact of the static lens and formal frame in these scenes is all the more telling after the swivelling, tracking camera style that has recorded the events of real life. Every performance of 'Golfo' is interrupted in the film, and with the rigid lens fixed on the backdrop, the effect is of events inexorably impinging from outside on a calm, twodimensional world. The Italian invasion of 1940, for instance, interrupts a performance with sounds of sirens and planes. The hall clears and as the bombs begin to drop nearby the camera holds inscrutably on the mute unchanging backdrop as the lights flicker and shake. So convincing does this formal two dimensional style of filming become in the performance sequences that it is a real shock when, after a rehearsal, one of the actresses walks down the hall. parts the backdrop and walks through to reveal the players seated at a table, eating.

At the end of the film. Electra tries to reform the troupe. It is 1952. When she visits the most radical actor—who has survived the Civil War—and asks him if he would like to join, he replies with a searingly moving visionary refusal which Angelopoulos culled from the diary of a Civil War guerrilla. He explains that it is because of the factories, because of the hotels, because of the new wealth, that the travelling players of the folk tradition of 1922 have become an anachronism in 1952. Electra withdraws. leaving him staring at the white wall of his empty room, all but insane. But the troupe does re-form.

The contrast between actual landscape and stylised backdrop is echoed by a parallel contrast in the way Angelopoulos orchestrates his sound. The rich and subtle density of everyday sounds is remarkably recorded—it becomes hypnotic in a film with so little dialogue. Pop songs, street bands, radios, the voice of a girl almost inaudibly echoing the phrase of a saxophone loud in the foreground. But at times of political stress, this fecund web of sound is replaced by the highly stylised call and countercall of fascist and communist anthem. The effect is both amusing, as when royalists and communists call upon the services of a bewildered dance band in a hall, to augment their anthems in turn, and terrifying. Sound too, is caught up in the theatrical metaphor.

There is at the heart of the film a deep sympathy with elements in the Greek Communist Party, which raises the question of propaganda. There is an isolated, fascinating shot of a communist flag swirling against the sky, cut in during a communist rally. It is reminiscent of Leni Riefenstahl's propagandist films and is highly emotive filming. But it is so unlike anything else in the film in its crisp brevity that it is more like a quotation than an integral image.

It is as if Angelopoulos were stating the possibility of propaganda, rejecting it, but admitting commitment. And the communist tradition in Greece is different from anywhere else. The party was denounced by Stalin in 1934, and consequently concentrated on the problems of the Greek peasant, in some ways attaining an understanding of Greek rural life that endeared it to the populace. There are still islands vyhich, although completely unindustrialiszd, vote 90 ".;', communist—Lesbos for example. It was the communists who organized the resistance against fascism during World War II. So the film's commitment should be seen in this Greek context. Angelopoulos's humanity and integrity are never compromised by it.