The historical panorama in post-1974 Greek cinema: The Travelling Players, Stone Years, Crystal Nights, The Weeping Meadow

Unlike the majority of Greek historical films made before 1974, which dramatized specific events, after 1974 some leading Greek film-makers shot historical panoramas, whose plots spanned many periods. This article analyses four such historical panoramas that cover roughly similar periods, Angelopoulos’s O Thiasos/The Travelling Players (1975) and To Livadi pou Dakrizei/The Weeping Meadow (2004), Voulgaris’s Petrina Hronia/Stone Years (1985) and Marketaki’s Kristallines Nihtes/Crystal Nights (1992). The article situates each film within its broader cultural context and identifies the forces that motivate the history’s development, the plot’s logic and its formal substantiation. Each film, the article shows, suggests a different ‘historical cause’ for the events it depicts, ranging from imperialist processes and immanent human traits to psychoanalytic and mythological drives, and uses distinct formal means to convey the events. The examination of these four historical panoramas also attests to the gradual ‘de-politicization’ of auteur Greek cinema, in addition to prompting us to reflect on the various cinematic forms through which history can be represented and the different ways in which historical events can be linked and interpreted.