The Hunters

On New Year’s Eve, 1977, a party of hunters – out in an area close by the Lake of Ioannina – find the body of a Greek Civil War partisan in the snow. They end up carrying the dead man’s body back to their hotel and, there, find themselves held to account by the courthouse of history. If anyone was qualified to talk about the ghosts of history, politics, and ideology, of revolution and of dreams betrayed, it was Theo Angelopoulos. In The Hunters, one of the most iconic works in his oeuvre, he sets all these ghosts up against one another, and in doing so makes clear that the figure best placed to give an account of their clashes – due to its very nature – is yet another ghost: that of cinema. Perhaps because at the heart of history, politics, and ideology, of revolution and of dreams primarily lie images – images that haunt, enchant, overpower, inspire, and spur on. And with such stuff, the world of cinema is made.