The Hunters

The middle panel of Angelopoulos's history trilogy, between The Travelling Players and Alexander the Great, The Hunters went into the Cannes competition in 1977 and is the most openly accusatory film he made. Greece was three years out of the dictatorship; the film asks what the people who prospered under it had buried.

A shooting party of industrialists, officers, politicians and their wives comes across a dead partisan in the snow on New Year's Eve 1976. The wound is fresh. They take the body indoors, and the evening turns into a sequence of interrogations, confessions and rehearsed memories in which each of them accounts for where they were during the civil war and the years that followed. Angelopoulos films it in his customary long takes, but here the technique does something colder than usual: guests step out of the present into staged tableaux of the past without the camera cutting, so that thirty years of Greek political life happen in the same hotel ballroom.

It is a difficult, deliberately airless film, and it has never had the audience of the works on either side of it. But it is the clearest statement of the idea underlying all of them — that the Greek civil war was never concluded, only covered over — and its central conceit, a corpse that refuses to finish dying, is the kind of image that stays with you long after the argument around it has faded.