THE HISTORY AROUND

Theo Angelopoulos’ trilogy of History consists of Μέρες του ‘36 (Days of ‘36, 1972), Ο Θίασος (The Travelling Players, 1975) and Οι Κυνηγοί (The Hunters, 1977). In Ο Μεγαλέζανδρος (Megalexandros, 1980), the last film of this period, Angelopoulos adopts the idea of representation not as a reconstruction of things past but as the visualisation of their ability to lose their historicity and be transformed into legends and epic tales. Some scholars (see Bordwell 2005: 143) and the editors of this book consider the film to be the logical offspring of the aforementioned films and they see it as an addition to the trilogy of history, which they have renamed as historical tetralogy. No matter which classification one uses, this trilogy of films is one of the most radical ‘political’ interventions attempted within the established visual poetics of World Cinema. Both historically and culturally, these films were produced at the beginning and the end of a period of extreme experimentation with visual representation, becoming in their own distinct ways meditations on the limits of representability, on the function of cinematic images, and on the visualisation of collective memory. Because of this visual testimony, Angelopoulos’ work can be seen as the emblematic turning point from a historic epoch of grand revolutionary projects, as culminating in the 1968 global rebellions, to the new era of diminished expectations and frustrated projects, with the gradual revival and domination of conservativism after 1979. ‘Tout est politique’ was the slogan that inspired a whole generation of filmmakers in France, the USA, the UK, Italy and Greece during that decade; the phrase ‘implied an analysis of the situation presented, while it also altered approaches to the representation of history and even the relation established between spectator and representation in the historical film’ (Smith 2005: 13). Indeed in cinema it led to a series of historical films that re-envisioned the past and re-imagined its codes of representation, constructing an oppositional aesthetic of contestation and negation. By contrast, official ‘history’ was seen as ‘a selfjustifying myth’ (Hobsbawm 1997: 36) after its ideological appropriation by the dominant political order.