| THE
HUNTERS
(Greece.
1977. 165 minutes. Colour)
Directed
by : Theo Angelopoulos
Screenplay by : Theo Angelopoulos with
the participation of Stratis Karras
Cinematography by : Giorgos Arvanitis
Music by : Lukianos Killaidonis
Edited by : Giorgos Triantafillou
Sound by : Thanassis Arvanitis
Production designed by : Mikes Karapiperis
Produced by : Theo Angelopoulos and
Nikos Angelopoulos
Production : Theo Angelopoulos Productions
with the participation of INA
With : Vangelis Kazan (Savvas), Betty
Valassi (his wife), Giorgos Danis (Yannis Diamantis),
Mary Chronopoulou (his wife), Ilias Stamatiou (Antonis
Papadopoulos), Aliki Georgouli (his wife), Nikos Kouros
(the General), Eva Kotamanidou (his wife), Stratos Pachis
(Giorgos Fantakis), Christophoros Nezer (the Politican),
Dimitris Kamberidis (the Communist).
Synopsis
It is New Year's Eve. 1976. On a Greek island a party
of bourgeois hunters comes upon a body, buried in the
snow and miraculously preserved by the cold. By his
uniform, he appears to be one of the thousands of partisans
killed during the civil war and the hunting party, a
group of the ruling elite, must now decide what to do
with the body. When they disinter it, blood begins to
flow from the wounds in the partisan's body and they
carry it back to the lodge where the inquest begins.
The film becomes a biting commentary, an extraordinary
allegory for the persistence of guilt in which Greece's
post-war Right is placed symbolically on trial in a
series of tableaux in which the hunters are faced with
their re-created sins. Merging poetic metaphor and historic
reconstruction each member of the hunting party views
the body on the makeshift bier: the colonel and his
wife, the businessman, the ex-prefect of police, now
a publisher, the ex-partisan who is now a wealthy contractor,
the politician, the film actress who collaborated with
the Nazis, the royalist noblewoman - all are forced
to give an account of their actions since the civil
war. Finally, they dream their own execution by partisans
but awake to find it was but a collective nightmare
provoked by the dead body of the partisan. In the gray
dawn they rebury the corpse and with it, hopefully,
their own guilt.
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