The Hunters

The final film in Theo Angelopoulos's trilogy of history. New Year's Eve. A party of well-off hunters finds a body frozen in the snow. By his uniform the man is a partisan killed in the civil war, and the cold has preserved him. When the body is lifted out, it begins to bleed. The hunters carry it back to the lodge and argue through the night about what to do. As the argument goes on each of them returns to his own past: who did what, who informed on whom, who stood on which side, each staged in turn. That is the method: the scenes do not separate present time from memory; within a single shot a character crosses into the past and the camera does not cut. The timing matters. It was made in Greece after the junta, and its subject is exactly what that period chose to keep quiet about: that the civil war was never accounted for. It competed at Cannes in 1977. The hardest link in the trilogy for anyone who likes Angelopoulos's long takes and political allegory. For a viewer who knows nothing of the Greek civil war, the film introduces nothing and most of its references stay unexplained.