Alexander the Great

Made immediately after The Hunters and running three and a half hours, Alexander the Great is the most severe film in Angelopoulos's severe first decade. Venice gave it the Golden Lion for Experimental Film in 1980 along with the FIPRESCI prize, an award pairing that says something accurate about how the film was received: admired, and held at arm's length.

Omero Antonutti plays the bandit of the title, who breaks out of prison as the twentieth century begins, takes a group of English hostages with him and rides north into a mountain village that has abolished private property. The villagers greet him as the figure of prophecy. What follows is a study of how a liberator becomes something else, staged with Angelopoulos's usual refusal of close-ups and psychology — Antonutti barely speaks, and is often shot as a black silhouette on a horse against snow.

The film was read at the time as a verdict on the Greek left, on charismatic leadership, and on the folk-hero tradition that produced Alexander's name in the first place; Angelopoulos, who had been a committed man of that left, was clearly settling something with himself. It is the least seen of his major works and the hardest to love, but it is where his political thinking is most exposed, and the mountain village sequences contain some of the most beautiful images Giorgos Arvanitis ever shot for him.