the traveling players

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Review: [untitled]Author(s): Hans KoningSource: Film Quarterly, Vol. 30, No. 3 (Spring, 1977), pp. 46-50Published by: University of California PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1211774

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46 REVIEW

entailed acceptance of what is terrible about the

world, and not in confecting charmed lives and

making other lives fit the pattern. The resilienceand transparency of Renoir's characters, likeTanner's, is not a datum but an achievement that

is hard won; think of the children in The Riveralongside Truffaut's. It's not a difference of

emphasis, or visual style, but of temperament.Truffaut makes community easy; he finds it readymade; whereas Renoir (witness Le Crime deMonsieur Lange) does not. And neither does

Tanner, who succeeds in Jonah, where Truffaut

fails, in doing justice to the heritageof Renoir.-PAUL THOMAS

0 THIASOS

Directionand script: TheodorAngelopoulos.Photography:Georges

Arvanitis.Music:Loukianos ilaidonis.

All the arts, and film perhaps most obviously, are

political. But as our arts and letters are mostlyliberal in a mostly liberal environment, their

political messages tend to be as invisible as

greenflies on green leaves. This is basically howliberal art can think of itself as floating far above

art-as-propaganda, and on its self-satisfied cloudthe celebration of individualism and the accep-tance of the basic rules of the game of our societyare equated with honest objectivity about allhuman endeavor.

In the thirties and early forties, Americanmovies were somewhat more liberally liberal than,say, the newspapers. The papers belonged to old,Republican families, and the studios to new, first-

generation Democrats (our immigration used tobe leftish; since 1945 it has been rightish). At

present the West Coast movie colony is still or

again liberal, with perhaps a few radical spots.But even so the Vietnam war was a forbidden

topic; the Movement of the sixties was used onlyas a gimmick to get the young into the moviehouses. The fifties and sixties thrillers with theirRussian or Chinese inhuman scoundrels and CIAand FBI heroes, in appearance harmless enough,may have contributed in a subtle way to the

presumptions that made the Viet war possible;

their present-day successors, in their more "neu-tral" solemnization of greed and violence, lendthemselves, in my vocabularyanyway,to the use ofthat much bedraggled label "fascist." In anyevent, they certainly do not question the rules ofthe game-they show how to play it with totalruthlessness, and as for the cult of the individual,

they carry it to what I hope is the ultimateextreme. But of course they still come across inthe movie houses as nonpolitical.

There is nothing surprisingin this record. Largesums of money are at stake, and the Americanpublic has consistently bankrupted obvious mes-sage movies, movies questioning our (non-) philos-ophies, movies in which the personagesare not thebeginning and end-all but bearers of history,bearersof ideology.

People as bearers of history or ideology: thosewere the very words used by Theodor Ange-lopoulos in one of the interviewshe gave after the

screening of his film O Thiasos in Cannes in 1975.

"People do not interest me as personages," hesaid, "but only as bearers of historyor if you will,ideology." Here then is a director practicingsocialist realism, practicing what we used to callBoy-meets-tractor art; and he is not an East

European with a presold state distributor andstate theaters but a man who has to take hischance in the westernmarketplace.

O Thiasos is one of those rarest of birds: acompletely successful (radical) political movie.And by "successful" I mean that it is not doomedby its message to exile in the small houses withthe broken seats where the faithful gather at

midnight. It is successful as a film per se and itdeserves to make it and should make it in anyAmerican town whose inhabitants can read andwrite. Which provesonce more: there are no rules.It all depends on howyou do it.

O Thiasos is Greek for "troupe," a road

company of actors that is (the movie is now

showing in England under the title, The TravelingPlayers). Angelopoulos, who wrote and directedit, is a 40-year old Greek, Sorbonne-educated,who has done two previous feature films. OThiasos runs 3 hours 41 minutes and was made onthe incredibly low budget of five million drachmas(less than two hundred thousand dollars). Moreabout the incredibilityof that later.

"It was the autumn of the year 1952. We arrived



REVIEWS 47

in Aigion. We were exhausted, we hadn't slept intwo days." Thus the story starts, and we see a

bedraggled group-actors, actresses, a child, alittle man with an accordion, suitcases, a trunk,in the empty station square of the small townwhere they are to do the one item on their

repertoire: Golfo the Shepherdess. (Golfo is the

storyof the doomed love of

beautiful Golfo andpoor Tassos, a hundred-year-old, ever popular,Greek rustic Romeo and Juliet drama by the local

playwright Parsiadis.) The players start walkingtowardtheir little hotel. The shabby old houses of

Aigion are plastered with posters for Field Mar-shall Papagos, the man who defeated the uprisingof the left and communist ex-resistanceEAM andELAS and who is now about to be made head ofstate in the pseudodemocratic election. A soundtruck rolls by, extolling the marshall; handbillsare scattered and cover the muddy sidewalks and

emptystreets.0 Thiasos tells the story of this road company

and its wanderings, from 1939 until 1952. Or

better, the film's story is told within that frame-work. It is reallythe storyof Greece we have here:the fates of the players are national fates, reflec-tions of the fate of their country. That's what

Angelopoulos meant by "they're bearers of his-

tory." But I have to rush in a qualification: thereis nothing painfully symbolic about this, nothingdeep or artificial. The love, corruption, rebellion,

adultery, courage, we get to see could have

happened to any random group through those

bloody years. They are privatebut not anecdotal;thus they are universal, the precise opposite of theadventuresof a James Bond orGodfather.

Greece was invaded by Mussolini in 1940 butthe Greek armyquickly beat the Italians far backinto their pitiful Easter-1939 conquest, Albania.In 1941 Hitler's armies and Stuka planes bailed IIDuce out and Greece fell under German occupa-tion for three and a half terrifyingyears. A greatresistance movementsprang up in the mountains,largely communist, and after the liberation com-munists entered the government while the resis-

tance fighters disarmed. Presently a rightwingregime grabbed control and the former Nazicollaborators reappeared in the streets. Years ofcivil war followed and with the help of the British

army and US arms and money, the popularrebellion was crushed. It is an episode on which

our media, somehow, don't dwell quite as much as

they do on the somewhat mirror-likebut ratherless bloody Soviet suppression of the Hungarianuprising of 1956. In Greece, Field Marshall

Papagos became in November 1952 the first of asad list of "colonels," militarymen whose rule hasnow, at least for the time being, been ended by

the countercoup of June 1974 which brought inCaramanlis.Those are the years O Thiasoscovers,but (and it is a huge "but") you do not have toknow all this. The drama of those performerswiththeir trunk of paraphernalia and their personaladventures in crummy, cold hotel rooms, willcome across with the humor and sadness it has inabundanceevento those who don't know any moreof World War II than can be gleaned from the

late-night movies. That this is so is one of theseveral miracleswhich Angelopoulos pulls off.

Within that frame of war-occupation-liberation-civil war, the

troupemoves

throughthe

landscape,but within the troupe there is yet another plot,interwoven with the national drama, and this

plot is a loose reflection of nothing less than

Aeschylus's Oresteia. Greeks often give theirchildren classical names and there isn't anythingtoo strange in a brother and sister in the road

company being called Orestes and Electra. ButOrestes's father is shot by the Germans, and theman who does it, the companyleader, had becomehis mother's lover. After the war, Orestes killsboth the lover and his mother. At that time heis in hiding as a former resistancefighter, but his

sister Electra smuggles him into the little theaterwhere they're then playing; he appears in his

O THIASOSTheTraveling layers)



48 REVIEW

tattered armyuniform and shoots down the two onthe stage. His action strangelyfits into the plot ofthat old favorite Golfo the Shepherdess and is

applauded by the audience which might have

thought it was watching an updating of the play.

For Golfo provides yet a third strand withinthis weave, though it is never fully played out onthe screen. On one occasion, the Italian invasionand an airraid interrupt. Then again, there is thatdouble murder. At another time, as we see Golfostart up once more, two men in belted raincoats

appear in the wings to arrest one of the actors.Yet the few lines we hear, and their fateful

interruptions, against the pathetic stage backdrop(a picture of three sheep grazing) fit, too, withinthis immensely complex story.

You may be thinking at this point that it allsounds

very clever, but surely it is a bit too much.I must assureyou that it isn't.

During the almost four hours that O Thiasos

runs, I felt no awareness of mental games beingplayed. The stories come together naturally: thecrisscross of plot and idea seems innate and

preordainedby the material. The lover is preciselythe kind of man who'd go Nazi under the German

occupation and have an affair with the wife of theman he has betrayed, and who, himself arrested,mumbles "Kamerad, Kamerad," and hides be-hind his mistress from the German rifles. Orestesis the kind of

youngman who'd take to

themountains, avenge his father, refuse the postwaramnesty, and end up in front of a firing squad onone of those barren islands the Greek rulers usedas prisons for their opposition. One feels that the

parallels between a fifth-century-BC tragedy, a

nineteenth-century folksy play, and the drama ofour own time came to Angelopoulos because theyare obvious for all to see.

After Orestes's execution, his sister is sent for,to collect the body, which she finds dumped on atable in a whitewashed, empty basement in theprison building. As she breaks into tears, she

whispers her line "Good morning, Tassos," fromGolfo-for in that play she is the shepherdess andher brother used to play the unhappy suitorTassos. Yes, they are theater people, these travel-ing players, convincingand ungimmicky. Orestes'sbody is taken by his family and colleagues on ahorsedrawncart down a country road to its grave;and when the last shovelful of earth has been

dropped on him, his sister suddenly starts clap-ping and all of them take it up-applause for abrave man, whose defiant performanceends therein the little rainswept cemetery. It works-whatmore can one ask? By some magic, Angelopoulos

gets away with fantastic effects which in anold-time Hollywoodmovie might have been nause-ating. The magic, I do not doubt, is his believingin what he is doing and sharing the emotions he isshowing. That's what it takes to write and shootsuch a scene-nothing more, nothing less.

I hope I have been reassuring enough to nowdare introduceone more dimension: time. Indeed,time is also used, independently almost, to com-plete the weave of private and public fate. OThiasos has no straight chronology, no linearstory. All action takes place in the present, or

perhaps, if you will, in the same moment in thepast. Wejump around at will. Those same players,for instance, who walk into Aigion for their one-night stand in the fall of 1952, turn a cornerand are suddenly on the market square underthe German occupation, with the town crier an-nouncing that Dr. Goebbels will pass throughon his way to Olympia and with some kind oflocal Greek Hitler Youth parading around andsingingtheir anthem, in whichthe fascist companyleader defiantly joins. And the film ends on the

troupe-all were still alive then and the child of

one of the actresses was still only a little boy-arrivingin that same town in 1940 at the outbreakof war, "exhausted after two sleepless nights onthe train"; and nothing is different but for thewaiting horse and cart which in 1952 (four hoursearlier in screening time) have been replaced by atruck. "Brechtian-everything is the present,"those who want to, may mutter, and the Cannesinterviewersmutteredjust that. Angelopoulos ad-mires Brecht; which serious director doesn't? Nomatter-it comes off. There isn't a moment ofconfusion, there are no selfconscious flashbacks,

no dissolves. There are, and this will put many amoviemaker to shame, no title cards, no super-imposed names or dates, no voice-over commen-tators, no extraneous aids. We are always there,and we know where we are. It is kept togetherby that great cinematic sleight of hand: trulybrilliant editing.

Two weeks after the first screening, I went tosee O Thiasos once more, just because I felt un-



REVIEWS 49

comfortable about my own enthusiasm. But I re-

acted the same way: the timing and spacing still

came across as inspired. Angelopoulos takes this

timing most meticulously. Each scene is built;

streets, stairs, corridors, all have their place and

take their time to walk, to climb. But there is no

footage without purpose and no restless minute in

those 221 minutes of screening. Now I am haunted

by a strange nostalgia for this film, a longing to

see it yet again. It has a reality of its own now,like some few other films, and novels, and plays;it is an addition to our patrimony.

There are awkwardmoments, two scenes specif-ically, in which the director in somewhat allegor-ical fashion shows us how the people are curedfrom their naive postliberation enthusiasm for

"the Allies" by the riot police, and how the civil

war against the communists is waged by theBritish. Allegorical, because the battles and dem-

onstrations, involvingnot many people, are set upin a stylized form. Angelopoulos did those scenes

last, and the problem was money. It was thesescenes which made him say, "I wish I had had

double mybudget."Though I am certain that the director and

producer kept cost to a minimum, this budgetwas, as I have said above, incredibly low. Thefilm is beautifully photographed (by GeorgesArvanitis), in subtle, subdued colors. Instead of

waiting for sun, the director made a point ofwaiting for bad weather-snow or rain to fit themood of his story, dark clouds chasing across the

sky. There are many night scenes. Think of the

lighting problems; just think of the cost of filmstock for a four-hour movie! One of Angelo-poulos's secrets are his long sequence shots: manyrun from seven to nine minutes, and they were

repeatedly done, after rehearsals, with only one ortwo takes. The quality of the image and of thesound track is impeccable; here for once is filmmusic I'd like to have an LP of. Loukianos

Kilaidonis was responsible for the mix of songs,from an old Greek-Italian vaudeville thing calledYaxebore to the fine use of the post-1945 jazzAmerica brought to a Europe which had beenforcefed all during World War II on a sleazyGerman popular music. Justice was done, on thisone occasion, in the show business world: OThiasos had record grosses in Greece, the never-

interfering producer (Georges Papalios) made a

stack of mohey, and the actors and actresses who

had gotten so verywet and tired and dirtythroughthe months of shooting did receive their de-

ferments.

One more oddity about this movie, which has

done away with so many rules, is that most of itwas filmed before June 1974, that is, before the

overthrowof the colonels. Producer, director, and

company were quite aware of the fact that their

film might never be released. No one but

Angelopoulos knew the script; the Ministry cen-

sors breathing down his neck were fed phony bitsof script with much Aeschylus and some Golfo init. As they wandered from location to location,

using a piece of a village here, of a town there, the

fascist songs and other goings-on on the setconvinced many a local mayor that the colonels

were having themselves a real ultra-right moviemade.

During the first democratic honeymoon days of

the new Caramanlis government, Angelopoulosfinished the film and shot the scenes he couldn'tdo before, such as a mass demonstration with

Russian, American, and British flags in a crowd

under police fire. It is likely, he says, that theywouldn't let him do these any more now. TheGreek government refused to enter the film offi-

cially at Cannes in 1975, which created a scandal

afterward, for as a government entry, it would

have given a boost to the Greek film industrywhich at the moment mainly coughs up anoccasional bit of pornography.

Like other writers I know, I sometimes cannot

resist the thought as I walk out of a theater after

seeing a nice film: I could have done as well. Oreven: I could have done better. O Thiasos assur-

edly does not make me think that. Its purity andits completeness continue to amaze me. I do notknow if Angelopoulos, who learned his use of

off-space (the camera stays where it is, the actionmoves off screen) from Bergman, will be Greece's

Bergman. There is so much in this film that Iwouldn't be surprised if it had emptied him, the

way Don Quixote emptied Cervantes. If it did, itwould have been well worth while. New groundwas broken, and not only cinematically. It hasshown us, once and for all, that it is possible to

practice message art (social or even socialist

realism) in the west, without losing the art, the

tension, the emotion, the truth, and even the



50 REVIEW

entertainment, on the way. What is this film reallyabout? A dozen years of human history, of modern

history, shown in the lives of people even as youand I, and shown from a truly radical point of

view, which makes for a very different kind of

history from the one James Reston writes in theNew YorkTimes.

Propaganda? Yes! Finally, we may have some

propaganda then from the other side, from where"the people" live rather than the dog food manu-facturers or the oil company chairmen. And ifsuch films are shot by men or women believing inthe emotions portrayed, they may even beat Jawsat it. For I know Angelopoulos himself would

cry, and perhaps die, for a murdered resistance

fighter; while I doubt that Steven Spielbergwoulddo the same for a shark.

I have no idea how Angelopoulos got it all soright. He was born in 1936 and the war was overbefore he was eight years old. I lived throughsome years of German occupation (in Holland)and I saw the liberation of Europe from withinthe British army.-It is late evening in a smallGreek town, in the autumn of that frenzied yearin history, 1944. The camera is rolling backwarddown a street shiny with rain. A young woman,Electra, is slowly walking past the one cafe backin business, on British army beer and Scotch and

re-emerging black market Greek wine, no doubt.

Its windows are two eyes of bright light in thetotal blackness between the tired houses, underthe glowering sky. The wind blows loud snatchesof music toward us, Lili Marlene, and then Rumand Coca Cola. And I said to myself, as neverbefore in a movie theater, "Yes, that is how itwas." -HANS KONING

THEMARQUISEF0 . . .

Directedby Eric Rohmer rom the story by Heinrichvon Kleist.

Photographedy NestorAlmendros.

At a time when the traditional narrative is under acritical cloud it seems the height of perversityforRohmer to offer a painstakingly faithful adaptionof a 170-year-old novella. During the press con-ference that followed the New York Film Festival

screening he admitted to having tackled Kleist'sDie Marquise von O- partly as a challenge, tosee if he could "follow it to the letter" and stillcreate a viable film. To make the challenge evenmore perverse and difficult, he worked with theoriginal German text, learning the languagespecially for the occasion, and chose Germanplayerswith stage, not film, experience.

As much as I had admired Rohmer's earlierwork I went to The Marquise of 0 ... expectingthe challenge to fail. Not that I didn't also admireKleist. In fact, my accidental discovery of hisstories (in English translation) a dozen years agoremainsas one of the literary andmarksof my life.But it had never occured to me that they couldor should be transferred to the screen. A 1969film version of his most powerful novella, Michael

Kohlhaas, directed by Volker Schlondorff froman adaptation by the English playwright EdwardBond, did nothing to change my view. Thisnovella, which tells how a 16th-century horsedealer's continually frustrated attempts to obtainjustice from a minor nobleman lead him toorganizea full-scale rebellion, generatesan intenseexcitement that was almost completely dissipatedby Schlondorff in a welter of filmic detail-

sprawling cast, complex action sequences and alarge variety of locations. If Michael Kohlhaas,the one Kleist story that has obvious relevance to

the present time, could not succeed as a film, whatchance was there for a study in archaic attitudeslike TheMarquise f O... ?

The story is set in northern Italy during the

Napoleonic Wars. The Marquise, a young widow

living with her parents, is trying to escape from abombardment when she is assaulted by Russiansoldiers and rescued by one of their officers,Count F-. She falls unconscious for a time.Later, when the war is over, she finds herself

showing signs of pregnancy. Count F- stops offto visit while on a military mission, insistentlyproposes marriage, and can be induced to leaveonly after a partial consent. Soon the fact of the

Marquise'spregnancybecomes unmistakable. Herfather rejects her claim of innocence and throwsher out of the house. She places an ad in the local

newspaper offering to marry the unknown fatherof her child if he will only present himself. WhenCount F- appears and declares himself thefather, the Marquise goes wild and refuses to

the traveling players

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