Thursday 13 March at 19:00

Angelopoulos in Travelling Players breaks away from the mode of a realist narrative of the war, which could be compared to the methodology of historicism. As the director pointed out: “I had to find a way to avoid conventional images which have been imprinted to collective memory from films and story telling: hunger…deaths…persecutions”. Thus the narrative in Travelling Players begins and is anchored in 1952, during Papagos’s electoral campaign. This first sequence shot of Angelopoulos is indeed a dialectical image, since the past of 1938 has been telescoped to the present of the narrative in 1952. More precisely it acts as now-time perceived by the spectator each time the film is projected, as a juncture in time through which the redemption of the past is perpetually fought (i.e. the defeat of the Left during the civil war and the persecutions of its supporters, which the New Left - with which the director identifies himself - struggles to vindicate).