Once upon a time, a four-hour, post-Brechtian epic about personal and political betrayal that drew from both classical drama and 18th-century melodrama and featured a brilliantly self-conscious visual style was guaranteed to create lines at the local art house. That time ended soon after 1974, the year that Greek director Theo Angelopoulos created his masterpiece of historical and psychological insight, The Traveling Players. Although these times are more likely to feature sighs of relief over the blessed brevity of Patrice Leconte’s brilliantly condensed Monsieur Hire, the current theatrical release of Angelopoulos’s peculiarly modern epic presents an opportunity to see a cinema of truly grand – rather than grandiose – proportions.
A masterpiece in a dozen different ways, The Traveling Players is so complex that a critic attempting to explain it is in the same quandary as the proverbial blind men discovering an elephant. And though a four-hour film that demands repeated viewings is likely to be left unrequited, this film’s complexities promise repeated rewards.
The film’s action opens in 1952 and almost immediately flashes back to 1939, beginning a dramatic progression back to the present that is relatively straightforward except for infrequent flashforwards. These 13 years were unusually tumultuous ones even for Greece, beginning with the end of the Metaxas dictatorship, the war with the Axis, the Nazi occupation and bitter partisan war, the betrayal of the indigenous communist guerillas acting in concert with the English, and the final eradication of the communists by right-wing Greeks who were financed and supported by the Truman administration.
The central and ever-repeated act in this historical pageant is betrayal, and Angelopoulos has turned to a central Greek myth, the fall of the House of Atreus, to illustrate the ways betrayal and loyalty have marched together through Greek history. The story, whose immediate antecedent is another tale of betrayal and vengeance, features the king Agamemnon who, returning to his Greek home after the fall of Troy, is slain by his wife Clytemnestra and her lover (and, as I recall, cousin-in-law) Aegisthus. This murder sets of a quest for matricidal and homicidal revenge by the daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, Elektra, and her brother Orestes.
The central characters in Angelopoulos’s film bear the names and repeat the tragedies of the original members of the House of Atreus, but the acts are not a repitions nor a simple updating so much as an echo. Agamemnon (Stratos Pachis) is not a triumphant conqueror of Asia Minor this time, but a refugee from the disastrous Greek military adventures of 1922. Almost by accident, he has become the head of a ragtag troupe of traveling actors composed almost exclusively of his tragically named family, The film is introduced by their accordionist, who announces the production of the 18th-century "Golfo the Shepherdess," a romantic idyll that, again, features death and betrayal.
The actors can never quite get their production off the ground because history literally keeps intervening with hits acute sense of melodrama. The boundaries between the actors’ stage and history’s background intersect over and over. A key act of modern-day revenge occurs when Clytemnestra (Aliki Georgouli) and Aegisthus (Vangelis Kazan) are trying out their lines. And the only time we get the see "Golfo’s" denouement is when a detachment of British soldiers forces the troupe to perform it for their private enjoyment.
This theatricality might quickly turn precocious were it the only level Angelopoulos operated on. But it’s only the wedge with which we can start peeling back the film’s successive layers. Angelopoulos seems to disdain commonplace notions of psychological characterization, preferring to accentuate the influence of large-scale social forces in the formation of personality over the incidents of the cradle. But his players are more than ideological constructs. Before we are even absolutely clear about who is who, we see Elektra peer through a bedroom door and watch her mother the arms of her lover Aegisthus. Elektra throws up her arms and falls to the ground in anguish. The display has a classical force, not just in the gestures’ grandeur, but also in the way Angelopoulos has discovered a modern correlative to ancient notions of divinely ordered destiny. The collision between the individual and her fate is somehow unavoidable without being deterministic and so is thus tragic.
Angelopoulos not only avoids conventional psychology, he also dashes the norms of narrative cinema. Although as is the case with many epics, no single plot is outlined in The Traveling Players, it is more than a series of adventures and encounters building to a unifying climax. The vignettes are related to each other by the director’s complex camera style, almost devoid of close-ups and routine editing structures. Angelopoulos favors long, unbroken takes and, when possible, complex tracking movies that, to make it even more difficult, describe time as well as place.
These temporal depictions take two forms; The history of the film is the history of repetition marked by slight progress (this is a skeptical optimist’s work). This first sense is underlined in languorous camera movements that describe circles, not from the center as with a pan, but from the edge, as in a sinuous, curvaceous tracking shot. When the traveling players enter one particular town, they see a patriotic march on its outskirts. The camera accompanies the players as they move towards the march without an apparent sense of purpose, yet somehow inevitably, as twisting streets lead them into a progressive, if circular, convergence.
Angelopoulos also likes to open on a shot of a moving figure and then, as he tracks out with him or her, pan to the right. This causes the figure to disappear through the left frame line, as Angelopoulos keeps on tracking parallel to a new action – Greek clowns entertaining British occupiers for example. But just as the director doesn’t stop tracking after he’s begun panning, so he doesn’t stop panning either. So, eventually, he picks up on the original human figure he began with, this time entering from the right frame line. The movement not only connects the dramatic character with seemingly separate, large-scale events but, in the detailed way the larger event is depicted and then discarded, emphasizes the continuity of individual destiny within the circus of history.
When Angelopoulos tracks directly, it can mean he’s skipping forward through time. After the players arrive in that first village, they walk down a street in an unbroken shot. At the head of the street, it’s 1952, but at its foot, as we can tell from a public address system, it’s 1939. In one spectacular sequence, a bunch of drunken thugs leave a tavern after clashing with left-wingers in 1947. They stumble down the street, shouting slogans and threats, straighten into informal military formation and finally skip into a political rally at the end. In one shot they have traveled five years and, in doing so, have described their contemporary political history as a function of gait and posture.
No doubt, The Traveling Players is a difficult film. Actors address the camera directly or, for minutes at a time, no one does any addressing at all. Angelopoulos makes full use of his four hours, jamming it full of information, but at a leisurely, measured pace. And, at least rudimentary knowledge of Greek history is helpful.
But this is a great work. Having seen six other Angelopoulos films which ranged from the flawed (Alexander the Great) to the very flawed (Days of ’36), I was unprepared for a work of this stature. I won’t be anymore.