The Travelling Players

Shot under the Colonels and released the year after they fell, The Travelling Players is the film that made Angelopoulos's reputation and, for a large constituency of critics, the summit of post-war Greek cinema. It runs three hours and forty-three minutes across roughly eighty shots. The FIPRESCI jury at Cannes gave it their prize in 1975; the BFI named it film of the year; it entered the Sight & Sound critics' poll and has stayed there.

The company of the title is trying to stage Golfo the Shepherdess, a nineteenth-century rural melodrama, in one provincial town after another between 1939 and 1952. They almost never finish it. The Metaxas dictatorship, the Italian and German occupations, the British arrival and the civil war all walk into the frame and take the stage away from them, and the players are named for the house of Atreus — Elektra, Orestes, Agamemnon, Clytemnestra — so that Greek history and Greek tragedy are made to occupy the same body.

The famous formal device is the way time moves inside a single shot: the camera tracks down a street in one year and back up it in another, with no cut to mark the passage. Angelopoulos was arguing that history is not a sequence of episodes but a continuous surface you can walk along. Few films have made a political argument so completely out of camera movement, and none has made the argument at this length and held it.