Reconstruction

Theo Angelopoulos's first feature, drawn from a real murder case. It happened in 1968: a man who had gone to Germany as a labourer returns to his village and is killed by his wife and her lover. The film does not tell this as a crime story. The murder has already happened; the narrative follows what comes after, the investigation and the reconstruction of the event. Angelopoulos described his method as a double reconstruction. One is the events as they were told to him and as written in the court documents; the other is the re-enactment the police stage with the accused. As the two are laid over each other, it emerges that the truth has no single form. The murder itself is never shown. The setting is a mountain village in Epirus. The emptying of the village is not the background but the subject: the men have left to find work and few remain. It is in black and white. Toula Stathopoulou plays the wife. Angelopoulos's point of departure, for anyone who likes Greek cinema and slow, long-take narrative. For a viewer waiting for the murder to be solved, what interests the film is not the crime but the telling.