Angelopoulos weaves through time, turning it inside out as the troupe of actors in The Travelling Players moves through the landscape of Greek history in the years between 1939 and 1952. Violence and politics infect the players’ lives, as their story becomes a doomed Oresteia enacted as the Greek left is crushed during the Second World War and its aftermath under British liberation and then the Marshall Plan. The Travelling Players has the scope of a David Lean epic with none of the heroics. The film is an anti-epic, bravura in its camera movements yet micro-concentrated on events in the collective life of the film’s central troupe. Angelopoulos’ feel for American musicals turns this film into a war movie unlike any other, defined by the tropes of the director’s cinema: lurking, trench-coated policemen and thugs in Halloween masks, refugees, offscreen riots, firing squads, massacres and rigged elections.