- dir. Theo Angelopoulos
- year. 1975
- country. Greece
- run-time. 222 mins
- rating. 15
£6.00 (£4.50 conc.)
Film 2:00PM
One of the greatest works of world cinema from the distinctive vision of Theo Angelopoulos, starts our 3 film look back at some of his most notable films. Visually arresting and epic in scale, The Travelling Players is a film of history and conflict.
The action takes place during 1939-52 and is seen as a series of individual, often inexplicable events or tableaux, commentated by monologues, by slogans written on the walls or by songs. It reveals the period's turbulent history while focusing on a travelling company of actors who spend those 14 years wandering through provinces, cities and villages, performing, in increasingly threadbare circumstances, a 19th-century pastoral melodrama, Persiadis' Golfo the Shepherdess. They never get to finish the play and the tranquil sheep painted on their back cloth gaze down upon generations of anguish and bloodshed.
“The Travelling Players may be thought of as a meditation with three dimensions: history, myth and aesthetics. The viewer is constantly invited to alternate between emotional engagement and intellectual analysis.”