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I am about to utter one of those statements that
reviewers dread having to make, because it doesn't speak too well of
me, and it is always guaranteed to rile certain hard-and-fast
expectations about what film reviewing is. But here goes: I loved
Theo Angelopoulos' The Travelling Players, which I did not
fully understand, and in some senses, could barely follow.
So now that's on the table. Now, why is it such a big deal? More
than sounding like tepid praise (which it isn't meant to be), more
than belying my own grasp of history and narrative (which, in the
case of Greece and Greek cinema, I never pretended to have), my
confession unsettles me because it seems like a direct avenue into a
bad and predictable punchline. Did you ever hear the one about the
film critic who fawned over a four-hour movie in a foreign language
that uses nearly interchangeable characters and scattered Classical
allusions to illuminate three decades of political turmoil? What do
you do when faced with a movie like that? The easiest response is to
call it a masterpiece and move on. After all, the best authorities
indicate that Theo Angelopoulos is a genius, so Our Green but
Prudent Critic wisely elects not to rock the boat.
This is like a pure, distilled version of what so many readers of
film criticism despise. I have absolutely no doubts that the irked
respondents to my pans of
The Matrix
and The
Green Mile, those colorful epitheteurs who have written to
inquire why I can't just enjoy an escapist entertainment, or why I
don't know how to have fun, or how it feels to be so out of touch
with the popular audiences of a deeply populist medium, will find
certifiable proof of their suspicions when they hear me praise such
esoteric, cryptic material as The Travelling Players. If
these readers even give me another thought ever again (which is, in
itself, highly unlikely), now they may take fuller confidence that I
am, just as they suspected, a snob, a masochist, a walking
irrelevance, probably all three. Plus, most film reviewers, if we're
honest, can easily recall those years when we loved good movies but
didn't fully know why good movies were good. It's sort of a built-in
sin of the profession to admire that which you do not understand,
unless you adopt the equally pitiful stance of deploring it. And
it's comforting, if not always altogether true, to avow that we
entirely break this habit once our apprentice years have passed.
Then again, all moviegoers, beyond just the critics, share in this
practice, even though no one wants to talk about it. Is there
anyone out there who might have inflated your reaction to
Mystic
River just a little, because it arrived pre-fixed with a
Cannes & Cahiers seal of quality? Did you see
American
Splendor or
Rushmore
or Wonder
Boys and secretly wonder what all the fuss was about? Is it
ever any fun to be sitting on the couch after the last shot of
The Rules of the Game or (egads!!) Citizen Kane,
thinking, "What's so great about that, anyway?" Even fessing up to
an underwhelmed reaction is only a first step, frequently
compromised by the self-abasing rhetoric of bad break-ups: the
problem isn't you, Orson, it's me (even though it's totally you, you
know I think it's you!) For all I know, Edward Yang's
Yi Yi (A One
and a Two...) and Hou Hsaio-hsien's The Puppetmaster
really are sublime experiences, but I found them dull dull dull.
Still, there's that cautious inner voice, bred by the desire to
learn and to be challenged, nourished by the Time Out Film
Guide and the National Society of Film Critics, that urges
appreciation even when it isn't fully felt. Maybe it's true that
that which bores us but does not kill us really does make us
stronger? Is it true that some cinema is just good for you, despite
the medicinal taste?
All of this is given not as preparation for my thoughts on The
Travelling Players but as a self-defensive prologue, a
confession of sins committed elsewhere and questions asked at other
times. I raise them now because I wanted to be extra sure that these
were not the reasons I was aglow after The Travelling Players,
which honestly strikes me, in all its alienation and opacity, as a
thrilling and important and good motion picture. Its dull patches,
enigmas, and repetitions are purposeful and fascinating, just as its
revelations and traumas and poignant celebrations are purposeful and
fascinating. My enthusiasm for the film is mixed with
bewilderment梩here was hardly a moment in this four-hour movie that I
didn't find, at some level, bewildering梑ut that is not the same
thing, I don't think, as na飗e praise or closeted frustration. I
heartily urge you to see The Travelling Players, and then I
urge you to call me, so you can tell me your idea of what this thing
is about, and clear up some of what happens in it.
Made in 1974 and released on home video by New Yorker Films just
five years ago, The Travelling Players is writer-director
Angelopoulos' angry, bereft, but strangely patient response to the
political and moral collapse of his country. What little I know
about Greek history could dance on the head of a pin, and while
Angelopoulos is not really here to inform, the film certainly
indicates the broad strokes of what you need to know. Which is
mostly that Greece was an insane and deadly mess from the 1920s
through 1952, when the present timeframe of this temporally loopy
film takes place. There are, by the way, no strong signs that things
will improve from here: after years of Turkish invasions and
counter-invasions, Italian invasions, Nazi occupation, British
occupation, deposed kings, disgraced Prime Ministers, coups and
semi-coups, communist uprising and outright civil war, Greece
inhabits another uncertain juncture, soon to withstand yet another
semi-fascist nationalist ruler, or another foreign intervention, or
another wholescale disintegration. During the movie's inaugural
moments, a truck barrels through the puddled, dirty streets of
Aegios spewing pamphlets into the air and blaring campaign slogans
on behalf of Alexandros Papagos. As a first scene, even if you don't
know of Papagos' imminent "election" and reactionary politics, this
is even more dismal than watching that Walker for President van
wander the empty avenues of Robert Altman's Nashville. Rarely
do cinema audiences need much prompting to be cynical about
political aspirants, but it's notable how instantly this single
image, shot in a besmudged and inky combo of grays, browns, and
blues, conveys the desolate heartache of Greek self-identity.
Also present in this scene, and just as desolate, are the titular
band of roving actors, loaded down with heavy overcoats and dingy
suitcases. Immediately, we know that these travelling players will
not infuse the movie with life and bounce like George Cukor's do in
Sylvia Scarlett, or withstand the challenges of plague and
death as in Bergman's
The
Seventh Seal, or unlock some buried secret of the plot as in
Hamlet, or lure the artist or audience into any Brechtian or
Pirandellian wonderment at the spontaneous power of improvised
gesture or the metaphysical profundity of imagined realities. In all
their notable appearances in European film and theater, it is hard
to imagine a troupe of actors less boisterous or plucky or cunning
or invigorating than Angelopoulos' bunch. It's hard to even tell
these players apart, as they make their slow and sloven progress
through the landscape and through the movie. Even the most tempting
tool at our disposal梟ames like Orestes and Elektra, hearkening back
to Aeschylus' doomed House of Atreus梞ay not be wholly reliable,
because we quickly start applying mythological attributes to
virtually faceless people who may or may not deserve them.
While some devastating monologues, harsh betrayals, and elated
reunions eventually start to distinguish the members of the troupe,
we still leave The Travelling Players with markedly little
sense of the individual protagonists, or even of the actors playing
them. Stratos Pahis and Aliki Georgouli, as the husband and wife who
lead the troupe (which also includes their son and two daughters),
both offer gut-wrenching, ten-minute soliloquies straight to the
camera at different moments of the movie, when every line on these
actors' faces and every terse movement of their bodies feels
indelible...and even then, once they sink back into the ensemble,
you may not find them easy to recognize.
It's an odd and untraceable technique that allows Angelopoulos to
compel our full, compassionate attention during an extraordinarily
long epic about people we can't even remember, often in
circumstances we don't fully understand, and within a narrative
sequence so riddled with flashbacks and flash-forwards that even the
lines between cause and effect or life and death become blurred.
Even casual denizens of the arthouse will have seen all of these
techniques implemented in other movies, though not necessarily in
the same combination, or to the same degree, or at all to the same
effect. The recurring motif by which the players' rendition of a
pastoral piece called Golfo, the Shepherdess is forever
interrupted is not funny like it would be for Bu駏el, partly because
for Bu駏el the point would be the fact of interruption itself,
whereas for Angelopoulos the reason and manner of every interruption
is urgent and distinctive.
To take a richer example, an Alain Resnais film, say Hiroshima,
mon amour or Last Year at Marienbad, is just as
circuitous in its chronological sequence as is The Travelling
Players, and those films, too, are intimately concerned with
wounds in national memory and collective experience. But I'm sure
that if you sat Alain Resnais down and asked him what Marienbad
is about, he would say, "Time and memory"; if you posed Angelopoulos
the same question about The Travelling Players, my strong
hunch is that he would say it is a film about Greece. The temporal
daring of the film, much like its remarkably long and static
framings and its nearly anonymous cast, are unmissable attributes of
nearly every sequence, and yet somehow The Travelling Players
never seems to be about its formal dexterity. The same aching
sincerity about his nation's (mis)fortune's that made Sokurov's
Russian Ark
more than an exercise in one-shot wonder makes The Travelling
Players more than a bold test of montage or of audience stamina.
Certainly The Travelling Players, which is almost as long as
three Russian Arks, is also the more austere of the two
pictures, since Angelopoulos denies himself any fancy costumes or
lush mazurkas to draw in the viewer or listener.
At the same time, The Travelling Players is never a chore,
and it passes much more quickly than you'd think it might, because
we care about or startle at or rebel against or lament almost
everything we see, even when we aren't immediately sure why梐nd we
occasionally change our minds, and even change them back. As Chantal
Akerman did with Jeanne Dielman, her deservedly legendary
225-minute inquiry into alienated housewifery, Angelopoulos proves
himself to be so immersed in the concerns of the picture (just as
ideological as Akerman's, though his are historical where hers were
domestic) that the yearning to know, the impatience with daily
hypocrisy, the almost entomological scrutiny of human behavior
becomes a shared concern of the audience: Angelopoulos' passion
scales the formidable hurdle of his formal severity and becomes our
passion, too. Places like Vourla and Thessalon韐i and Omonia Square,
people named Constantine and Scobie and Papagos, could hardly seem
farther from my experience, and though The Travelling Players
doesn't have a single ingratiating bone in its body梟or is the film
out to incite global fervor about local crises, in the fashion of
The Battle
of Algiers梚t awakens and broadens a political capacity in
even the most unversed viewer. Rape, execution, famine, burial,
capture, and impressment all take place over the course of the
movie, and gunshots occur with the regularity of mile markers on a
highway; this is to say nothing of the overthrows, massacres, and
military battles that unfold off-camera. The biggest shock is how
none of this troubles the placid tone and pace of the movie, which
remains as unflappable as in a dream (which is why some of the
flashbacks and flash-forwards are even harder to notice).
Angelopoulos is a student and critic of history, as well as its
agonized child, tacitly but unceasingly posing the question of why
all of this has happened, and is happening. His will to know, which
carries over to us, is deeper and richer than any sensationalist
could achieve, and The Travelling Players thus has the rare
power to instill revolutionary sentiments without pyrotechnics,
without even reaching an obvious climax. The whole movie is actually
a climax, fraught at every moment with uncertainty, risk, and the
bone-weary coping strategies of everyday life.
All of this is ingrained at the formal level in those slow, fixed,
extended shots for which Angelopoulos is famous, and which
occasionally give way to pans and zooms that, for the very reason of
their habitual absence, feel like events in themselves. I repeatedly
found myself craning my neck to see around the edge of a shot, which
is an absurd but understandable impulse: the action in an
Angelopoulos scene usually poses a riddle whose cause, solution, or
crisis lurks just out of the frame. This is why the idiom of theater
works so well for Angelopoulos: the proscenium stage echoes the
fixed boundaries of his static camera, with the same nervous
energies and fathomless surprises waiting to arrive or intrude.
Also, one of the reviews I read after watching The Travelling
Players likened the constant wandering and tense apprehension of
the movie and its characters to the Greek myth of the Minotaur in
the Labyrinth, which strikes me as an especially apt connection,
although mid-century Greece seemed to have more than one Minotaur
hanging around its shadows.
By the end of The Travelling Players, you may wonder who
isn't a Minotaur: is anyone to be trusted? Is there room left in the
world for bravery, hope, possibility, art? (Unlike most films by
European auteurs, The Travelling Players does not take it for
granted that art is a synonym for any of those other terms.) Having
ceded my entire morning and early afternoon to this movie, I
immediately rushed to a nearby library to learn more about Greece
and to hunt down a sharp review with a well-considered response to
the film梐lready signs of a film that has achieved its mission, at
least in part. Most of the critics I read were just as baffled as I
was, though their tones ranged from the awestruck to the offended.
What connects all the reviews, including the one I am trying to
write, is a sense of The Travelling Players as an experience
to be reckoned with, on both the aesthetic and political fronts. If
the movie were exhibited as a gallery installation, its somber and
magisterial frames mounted across rooms and rooms, the visuals alone
(pale faces, hazy colors, dilapidated buildings that actually look
dilapidated instead of production-design dilapidated) would tell a
powerful story of sorrow and unrest. The major monologues, played
without visual accompaniment, would offer redoubtable testimonies to
a nation's grief, its victimization, and its own self-betrayal. The
actors, rarely showcased in the film, also work perfectly in synch
with Angelopoulos' frankly communist prioritization of groups,
ideas, and ensembles over individuals and unique emotions. I know I
didn't hear every note that is sounded by this tough, detailed, and
highly allusive movie, but none of the notes I did hear rang false.
I also never stopped listening, and in fact grew increasingly eager
to hear, and to see. To me, that's one way to describe a
legitimately great movie. Grade: A
From
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