The easier way to explain our failure to grant Theo Angelopoulos the position he deserves in modern cinema – that he is less theoretically experimental than Godard or less politically ostentatious than Pasolini we can grant, but why we fail to love seeing his films more than those of Antonioni or Fellini remains something of a mystery – clearly lies in the character of modern Greek history, which is far less familiar than that of the western European countries. Greece has gone through a collective experience of which most other modern nations have only known bits and pieces: revolution, fascism, occupation, civil war, foreign intervention, Western imperialism, exile, parliamentary democracy, military dictatorship and, after the sixties, a ringside seat at the horrendous violence of the new Balkan wars, with their flood of refugees recalling Greece's own refugee experience after being driven out of Ionia at the end of World War I (I omit the current economic disaster only because there was no time left for it to show up on Angelopoulos’ registering apparatus). The political passions generated by this unique experience of history were also, no doubt, foreign to a Western public perfectly willing to accommodate the left-wing sympathies of all the other filmmakers I have mentioned above, who worked in countries in which class struggle did not reach a state of outright civil war, except during the various wartime occupations in which local reactionary ideologies could be somehow masked by the presence of Nazis and their armies.

There are, however, other reasons for Angelopoulos’ lack of standing in the West and I will come to them shortly. First we need to sort out the periods of his work, and the cycles into which they can be divided (he himself preferred to refer to them as trilogies, an inexact description which seemed useful mainly for publicity). For the first works – I would count the first six in this category – centre squarely on the internal Greek situation and in particular, the dictatorship, the occupation and civil war, and the exile of the losers, the communists and the partisans.