Camera Obscura screens Theo Angelopoulos' Days of '36

This November CAMERA OBSCURA presents Theo Angelopoulos’ Trilogy of history. Theo Angelopoulos is one of the giants of twentieth century cinema. Fifty years after the premiere of his landmark The Travelling Players, we revisit three of his early works—films that powerfully reflect Greece’s turbulent political landscape in the mid-twentieth century. Tuesday 11 November (doors open 6pm for 7pm screening) - Days of ‘36 (1h40m) 1972 Sunday 23 November (doors open 2pm for 3pm screening) – O Thiassos (The Travelling Players) (3h50m) 1975 Sunday 30 November (doors open 2pm for 3pm screening) - The Hunters (2h48) 1977   Join us for the screening and discussion. Due to the long length of the Sunday films, there will be a break with food.   Days of ’36 – 1972 – 100min Filmed during the Regime of the Colonels, the film draws parallels between the regime and the dictatorship of Ioannis Metaxas, but it does so implicitly, in order to escape censorship. In May 1936, in a Greece riven by political strife, a trade union leader is assassinated. Sofianos, a petty criminal and police informant, is the main suspect. In prison he desperately tries to prove his innocence. We are on the eve of 1936 elections and the Metaxa government is barely holding on.   O Thiassos (The Travelling Players) – 1975 – 230min This epic film, widely considered a masterpiece, traces the history of mid-20th-century Greece from 1939 to 1952. There are multiple levels to this film. On the first level a group of travelling players tour through Greece putting on a play called Golfo the Shepherdess. In the next level the film focuses on the historical events between 1939 and 1952 as they are experienced by the travelling players and as they affect the communities which they visit: the last year of Metaxas' authoritarian dictatorship, the war against the Italians, the Nazi occupation, the liberation, the civil war, and British and American intervention in Greek affairs.  In a further level the characters live their own drama of jealousy and betrayal, with its roots in the ancient myth of the House of Atreus.   The Hunters – 1977 – 168min This is Aggelopoulos first film after the fall of the Junta. It deals with the common theme of the Right’s undermining of the democratic process, and with a narrative that ranges over a wide number of years. A group of hunters uncover in the snow the perfectly preserved corpse of a Communist fighter killed at the end of the Civil War in 1949. The hunters - all Rightists who have prospered under the anti-Left political climate that followed the defeat of the Communist Democratic Army of Greece - carry the corpse back to a hotel. A kind of inquest/police investigation is carried out around the laid-out corpse, and the Rightists give individual testimony, in this way ranging over Greek history since the Second World War.    All screenings will take place at LARC, 62 Fieldgate Street, Whitechapel, E1 1ES