Alexander the Great

Theo Angelopoulos's three-and-a-half-hour film, which takes its name from Alexander but is not about him. It begins on New Year's Eve of 1900. A bandit called Megalexandros escapes from prison and takes a group of English aristocrats hostage. What he wants is not money: he wants the landowners to give the land back to the peasants. He returns to his village, where a commune has been set up; the land is held in common and decisions are taken together. The real subject starts there: the man greeted as a liberator slowly becomes an authority above the village, and the commune dissolves around him. Two things sit behind it: the figure of the Greek folk hero Kolokotronis, and the Dilessi affair of 1870, when English travellers were kidnapped and killed by bandits. It screened at the Venice film festival in 1980 and won the FIPRESCI prize. Omero Antonutti leads; the film is spoken in Greek, Italian and English. An important work for anyone who likes Angelopoulos's long takes and political allegory. A warning about length and pace is in order: it runs three and a half hours, scenes flow for minutes without a cut, and the plot does not move quickly.