An essential (albeit controversial) point should immediately be made clear: the work of Angelopoulos is not ‘modernist’ in the sense that Anglo- Saxon critics have given to this term to qualify, in art history, a time past, but still belonging to modernity. From end to end, Angelopoulos’ work is, in fact, traversed by history. Yet modernity is defined precisely by our awareness of unsurpassable historicity. In the words of Jacques Rancière, we have entered into the ‘age of history’. He adds that it is also the ‘age of cinema’, as this late art possesses a singular power of ‘historicity and historicising’ (Rancière 1998: 60).

The films of Angelopoulos implement this power. The filmmaker's gaze upon Greece allows him to embrace the upheaval that altered the face of Europe throughout the twentieth century. His first full-length film, Αναπαράσταση (Reconstruction, 1970), which is set in a deserted mountain village abandoned by able-bodied men in search of a livelihood beyond its borders, is dedicated to the disappearance of age-old rural societies, one of the first examples of this upheaval. A succession of authoritarian regimes and foreign occupation are part of Greece's violent history. Ο Θίασος (The Travelling Players, 1975) describes the years that link General Metaxas’ 1936 takeover to that of Marshal Papagos in 1952 as well as the German occupation and the crushing of communist resistance by royalist forces aided by the American and British armies. As Το Λιβάδι που Δακρύζει (The Weeping Meadow, 2004) shows, in pitting ‘brother against brother’, the Greek Civil War (1947–1949) left the country long divided. It remained impossible for the fearful propertied classes in Οι Κυνηγοί (The Hunters, 1977) to accept the return of those communist guerrillas who were exiled in 1949, whereas a socialist government did come to power in 1981. Ταζίδι στα Κύθηρα (Voyage to Cythera, 1984) stages an amnesiac country where the new gods of the market economy exclude any reminder of the struggles and the revolutionary ideals of the past.

That film thus marks a turning point in Angelopoulos’ work. Ten years earlier, the horizon of The Travelling Players (filmed in 1974 during Greece's last military junta) was still that of a world free of oppression.