Marcel Carné on Children of Paradise: Forty-Five Years Later – Part One

A major work in world cinema, Les enfants du paradis (Children of Paradise) is Marcel Carné's best-known and most-loved film. From the moment a stage curtain opens to reveal the entire expanse of an 1820s Paris boulevard's clutter, disarray, the reciprocity between art and life is evident. Its enduring appeal stems less from individual talents and personalities (although Arletty, Jean-Louis Barrault, and Pierre Brasseur were never better) and more from the film's intense ethos of invention and quality, Carné's poised compositional sense, and, most importantly, the film's "warmth and kindness." Carné's theatricalized melodramatic universe, essentially a film about actors performing, blends many performance genres – tragedy, Shakespeare, pantomime – while retaining Poetic Realism's combination of pessimism and romanticism. As Pauline Kael acknowledged, this is a cinema poetry "about the nature and forms of love - sacred and profane, unselfish and possessive." 

The film was completed after two years of delayed production at the Victorine studios in Nice. The building needs for the Boulevard du Crime alone were astonishing, as this is where the majority of the external action occurs. Three months were spent removing 800 cubic metres of earth and replacing it with 35 tonnes of scaffolding. The fifty facades of theatres and other structures required 350 tonnes of plaster and 500 square metres of glass. When Carné learned of the Allies' Normandy invasion in May 1944, he purposefully held down the post-production process. He intuitively recognised that Les enfants du paradis, rather than being the final film of the Occupation, could be the first film of the Liberation. Such a method was appropriate for a film that emphasised the individual's freedom in the face of social constraints: upon its premiere in March 1945, the film became a major economic success, screening in Paris for nearly a year and grossing 41 million francs. According to Jill Forbes, the film's primary significance was its contribution to a nationalist effort, as filmmakers, Vichy sympathisers, and French patriots all desired "to beat the Americans at their own game by producing a stunning film that was distinctively French." If Les enfants du paradis was an overt attempt to rehabilitate the French film industry, it was also a covert attempt to utilise film to confront the horrors of the Occupation. It exemplifies a sort of 'symbolic resistance' in which an occupied populace reclaims its self-respect through "uplifting displays of national narcissism and self-esteem." Indeed, what is particularly remarkable is how Carné and Prévert managed to cloak an allegory of French resistance against German occupation. The picture threw a pall over the careers of everyone involved - unlike Carné, few of its cast members ever achieved such heights again. Nonetheless, its audacious sexual exploration, subversive cultural strategy, and proto-postmodernist blending of high and low art earn it a position in cinema's pantheon.

The following is excerpted from a 1990 audio interview that originally appeared on the Criterion Collection’s laserdisc edition of Children of Paradise. It was conducted by Brian Stonehill, who was a communications and media studies professor at Pomona College in Claremont, California, and the author of the 1998 book The Self-Conscious Novel: Artifice in Fiction from Joyce to Pynchon. Translation by Bona Flecchia and Alexandre Mabilon.

Brian Stonehill: What are your fondest memories of the making of Children of Paradise?

Marcel Carné: I shot the film during World War II. I was very bold then, and thinking about it now, it was madness to make such a film in a country lacking the bare necessities. Anyway, I started working on Children of Paradise, and the producer told me that, given the enormous success of Les visiteurs du soir—it had been a big hit at the box office—he now wanted a great film with great impact. It’s rare for a producer to come to a director with such a proposal, so of course I began to think. [Jacques Prévert and I] were living near Nice then, and one day, walking along the promenade des Anglais, scouring for ideas, we ran into Jean-Louis Barrault. I hadn’t seen him since the war began, and we went for a drink. Naturally, we talked nonstop about the theater, and he started to tell us about what had happened to the mime [Jean-Gaspard] Deburau. The artist was at the height of his fame—not that he was world-renowned, because at the time news didn’t travel so fast, but he was very famous in Paris and even in the French provinces. He was walking arm in arm with his mistress—he was wealthy then—when a drunkard called out to him and insulted the woman profusely, calling her a whore and all sorts of names. Seeing that the man was drunk, Deburau pushed him aside. The man, with that insistence peculiar to drunkards, came back at him. Finally, Deburau, exasperated, hit the man with his cane and, by some fluke, killed him. So he was tried, and it was a very public trial. But the reason we were so taken by the story, and why we would have liked to do it, was that the whole of Paris attended the trial only to hear the mime speak, to know what his voice sounded like. We thought it was a fantastic idea. We went back to our country retreat, near Nice, and started thinking. We soon realized that it wasn’t a good idea for a movie, that if we chose Barrault to play the part of Deburau, the audience would already be familiar with his voice. There was no suspense. And on the other hand, if we chose some unknown actor, people would have mocked his voice. So we gave up the idea . . . Well, actually, Prévert wanted to give up, but I said no, because I felt that the period in question—the boulevard du Crime, the theater—and a film paying tribute to it sounded good to me. So I went to the great Musée Carnavalet in Paris, to the prints department, sure that I would bring back some stuff. I also wanted to go to Saint-Germain-des-Prés, to a little bookstore I knew about a hundred yards from here, and to another one right behind it, to look for books about that period and its theater. I went to the Carnavalet and had copies of two hundred prints made. I found three or four books about the theater, and in one of those I found out that the upper balcony was called “Paradise.”

BS: And that wasn’t a common expression at the time.

MC: Not common at all. Nobody used it. Now people call it the henhouse, in common terms . . . So we played around with words. There was a toy store that no longer exists, on the rue Saint-Honoré, close to the Madeleine. It was called the Paradise of Children. So we called the film Children of Paradise, but it can bear a double meaning. The children could be the dead, so they are in heaven/paradise, or they could be the actors who play those characters. Also, the actors can be the children of the audience up there in Paradise.

BS: Was the Grand Théâtre actually directly facing the Théâtre des Funambules, the way it is [in the film]?

MC: No, it’s not facing it, it’s next to it. If you look at the boulevard du Crime, the Funambules is farther down, and the Grand Théâtre is on the left. Everything is on the left. There’s nothing on the right except panels of buildings for background shots. But we couldn’t build anything too spectacular, since the set was eighty to a hundred yards long . . . So we worked, we discussed the actors we could use. The great thing about Jacques was that we had the same taste when it came to actors. We liked and hated—well, “hated” may be a bit much, but we liked and disliked the same ones. And that was always the case. There was never a time when I mentioned using an actor and he’d say no because he didn’t like him or her.

So we started working suddenly and furiously. We realized that the film was going to be very long. See, people said that the performers on the boulevard du Crime were geniuses. We had to show that. It’s too easy to say that Mr. So-and-so is a genius. You have to express that he was a genius, was well respected, brilliant, and so on. You have to show it somehow, and that takes up reel time. French movies are generally about an hour and forty minutes long. We realized we had an additional twenty to thirty minutes of footage. People said that there was too much dialogue, although thirty-seven minutes of the film is pantomime. Anyway, we had to add those thirty-seven minutes to the hour and forty minutes. I said I didn’t want that responsibility. The producer was the director of the Studios de la Victorine in Nice. So I went down to Nice to see the producer. I told him everything was going well, that we were happy, and he was enthusiastic about the subject we’d chosen. Then I told him, “There’s a small problem, André [Paulvé]. The film is going to be very long.” He said, “What do you mean by very long?” I replied, “It’s going to be two hours and ten or fifteen minutes.” Of course, he replied, “But that’s going to cost a lot more money. And I’m not going to have any returns.” We thought about it, and he said to me, “Do you want to do it in two parts? Because I could manage that.” Two hours and fifteen minutes does not amount to two parts, so I said, “Listen, I can’t agree to make two parts all by myself. I’m going back to the country to see Prévert.” I had to take a tiny little train. It took three or four hours to travel six or seven miles. It was ridiculous. Jacques and I thought about it, and he finally said, “Yes, we can do it.” I went back down to Nice; the phone didn’t work, or at least not very well, so I had to go back down to tell André whether or not I accepted. I did, on the condition that in Paris, at least at first, they would project both parts in the same movie theater.

When we showed the film to Gaumont, which ended up becoming the final distributor, I said, “This is what the first producer promised me.” They told me they were under no obligation to honor the original producer’s commitment and asked me if I had any documents. I told them that I didn’t, that I simply trusted the producer’s word. We went through what seemed the longest negotiation. They eventually agreed. So we doubled the ticket price. I also asked them, “When you show the three-hour-and-ten-minute film, if I’m right, you’ll show it at 2:00, 5:30, and 9:00.” They said, “Yes.” So I went on, “I’d like for people to be able to buy tickets from the box office at 9:00 p.m.” They said, “That’s impossible—we’ll need one more person.” I said, “Come on, don’t make me laugh.” “Even worse, we’ll need two, since there are two theaters.” But I got them to agree because I had noticed that movies were doing very well during the war. We had no entertainment—no more television, no restaurants. The only thing left was the performing arts. That’s why cinema suddenly took off. French people discovered dance, classical music; they went to concerts and plays . . . I told the producers to do this: we’d sell the tickets at eighty francs apiece, which was double the normal price, and if, at the end of two weeks, revenues were lower, then they could do what they wanted. Revenues didn’t decrease for forty-five weeks. So the film stayed in its original cut.

I don’t know what it’s like in New York, in America, but I had assembled two versions of the movie: one where the film ran all at once, and another where it ran in two parts. The two-parter was shown over two different weeks, so we ran the opening score and a synopsis of what had happened in the first part. When it ran all at once, we didn’t need the synopsis. There was a five-minute intermission, and people would have a beer and come back into the theater, and it would start with Part Two. Pathé always ran the film in two parts, with the synopsis, even if they showed the whole thing at once. The audience got a bit upset, booed a little when they saw the synopsis, but I was never able to get them to show the single-segment version.

BS: What was it like to shoot during the occupation?

MC: It was a bit troublesome. We met with a lot of obstacles when we shot Les visiteurs du soir, in terms of materials—costumes, sets that needed a coat of shiny paint, or staff, which, you know, is made of plaster and horsehair. Horsehair was hard to come by in those days, so we used grass. Furthermore, we needed insulation material to coat the plaster, so we could paint over it before it dried. But we couldn’t find coating material either—it was requisitioned—so we just painted over the wet plaster, and we’d get big splotches forming on it. So we’d stop the take and cover the splotches. Also, we had a shiny paint for the pavement, and the actors would chip it with their shoes. We had ways of fixing it, but it was aggravating. What’s more, people were famished. We’d put fruit on the table, and the fruit was eaten even before we finished setting up. In the end, sadly enough, we had to inject fruit with phenol so the crew wouldn’t eat it. But we still had to put real fruit there for the takes, so the actors could use it. We warned everyone not to eat the fake fruit—it gave them diarrhea—and said that we’d put fresh fruit on the table only when we started shooting. There was a property man who’d set up the fruit plate. We had huge loaves of bread, and once, during a take, a loaf of bread was in my way, so I pushed it away to remove it from the shot, and it felt surprisingly light. I turned it over—there was a hole as big as my hand. The cameramen had eaten the entire inside of the loaf. Things like this happened every day. Satin, silk, velvet, we couldn’t find any of that stuff.

Children of Paradise, miraculously, was much easier. We didn’t need staff so much as wood for the decor, and we found people willing to sell materials—at outrageous prices, of course. A famous English tailor from the Lanvin store was wonderful about providing us with material for Arletty’s dresses. There were people who had materials that you couldn’t find. There were three or four stores of that kind, but those products were reserved for the German officers. Similarly, there were four or five restaurants in Paris for the superior officers, meaning lieutenant colonels and above. A commander was not allowed to go. I went there, even though the prices were exorbitant, but I liked a good meal. I made a pretty good living . . . Well, I did for a while, and then it got a little worse because, while we were shooting the movie, they asked us to make concessions, and I worked for free for six months or so and had to sell my parents’ house.

BS: Did you have any problems with censorship during the making of the film?

MC: Not at all. And yet we feared we might because people had said as much. In Les visiteurs du soir, there was some political innuendo—like the heart beating under the rock represented the heart of France beating under the occupation. The devil was Hitler. All kinds of things like that were interpreted as symbols, while neither Prévert nor myself had even thought about it.

BS: And during Children of Paradise?

MC: We were very scared. Since the film wasn’t finished, we had to be slyer than they were. What was really annoying was when we had scenes with extras, and God knows there were a lot. In the morning, the Germans came in with their own extras, from the unions, and made us use them. So we had to talk them out of it, since we didn’t like them—they were collaborators, you understand. We didn’t want them, so we invented excuses, saying that they didn’t have the right physique for nineteenth-century France. I’d say, “I have nothing against this gentleman, but I can’t use him.” We cheated like that all the time . . . I mean, it wasn’t all that terrible. What was absolutely terrible was that we were closely watched, because of the Resistance.

One day, I asked for one of the production directors—there were two of them—and I was told he would be back in an hour. I said, “He’s not here?” “No, he went to run an errand.” So I said, “Fine.” An hour passed, and then another. So I asked for the production director again—I forget his name. Finally, I found out that he had run off because there were two Gestapo agents waiting for him downstairs in our second-floor studio. We had opened a garage behind the studio to make it into a costume shop, and he fled that way. If, by chance, we hadn’t, the Gestapo would have seized him. I had an assistant director who—he never told me, but I learned later—was one of the leaders of the Resistance. I was upset, but there were obviously a lot of partisans in the crew.

Anyway, I had some problems because Arletty, as we all know, was the mistress of a Gestapo officer. A well-known one, actually, whom I met by chance once—handsome, intelligent, well educated. People despised her because of the affair, and she used to receive threats, like little wooden coffins.

BS: People say that she was even imprisoned at the time of—

MC: She was. Not exactly imprisoned . . . I had a friend who played a page in Les visiteurs du soir and who was good friends with Arletty. When the Resistance began to surface, she hid at this friend’s house. So he called me on the phone, saying, “Marcel, I have to talk to you.” I told him to come by, and he replied, “No, I can’t leave the apartment. I can only meet you at the bistro downstairs.” I asked him what was wrong, and he told me that he would tell me when we met. So I went right away, since he lived close by. He lived on the other side of the Moulin Rouge; it was about a half-mile walk. When I met him, he said, “Arletty’s hiding out in my home.” I said, “That’s a problem. What should we do? Be careful . . . Can’t she go anywhere else?” During that period, there were snipers on the roofs of Montmartre, and they went into homes and searched apartments. Anyway, he left, and two days later, I got a phone call from him saying that Arletty had been arrested in his house. A bunch of partisans knocked at his door. My friend, like an idiot, opened the door, and one of the partisans suddenly said, “Oh, look at the whore over there! Do you see Arletty over there?” So they arrested her, took her away; they came close to shaving her head at the station. They never hit her, but they were very lewd toward her, called her all kinds of nasty names and put her under house arrest outside Paris. There, she had to go see some kind of judge on a daily basis. The judge began to fancy her. Every day she went, and he joked around with her. One morning he said, “How do you feel this morning, Ms. Arletty?” She answered, “Not very ‘resistant.’”

BS: How was it working with her on Children of Paradise?

MC: She was wonderful. She had such stage presence with that double role. You see, Children was infinitely less hassle than Les visiteurs du soir. That’s what you call luck. I had a fantastic crew, because if the crew hadn’t been so solid and tight, since I don’t have a fascist streak in me, nor am I a born leader . . . I mean, you need a center of gravity. You have all the responsibilities, and people have to respond to you. And I never . . . Well, I had some arguments with the technicians, but even those were very mild. I never had serious arguments, and never argued at all with the actors.

BS: How was it working with Jean-Louis Barrault?

MC: He had a lot of input into the pantomime scenes. I chose him because he was a well-known and remarkable mime. [Étienne] Decroux had trained Barrault for a short while too.

BS: Yes, he was his professor—but there was a bit of friction between the two, wasn’t there?

MC: Yes, there was. There was some in the story, but also offstage.

BS: Is there a parallel between the actors’ lives and their roles in the film? Like when we spoke of Arletty earlier, she was also the victim of a judicial blunder.

MC: She clearly was. It was a perfect ending for the first part. It held together pretty well, especially because the first part is a bit longer than the second, and the opposite is usually no good. There are some rules when directing, you know. While shooting, you think the footage is flowing smoothly, but it’s not all usable. I learned about that with [Jacques] Feyder. He said, “See, I showed this scene at length, but when we come to this set, it’ll have to be shorter.”

BS: Did you learn a lot from Feyder?

MC: Not really . . . Well, yes. I did learn how to direct actors. The main influences in my work come especially from German directors, like Fritz Lang, Murnau, Pabst, and Sternberg, mostly for lighting and such. I’m also a fanatic for American cinema. I often watch B movies on television, and there’s always something. I can watch any stupid movie because of the lighting and photography. In France, we can’t work as well with color as we did with black and white. All the colors are very realistic, which is quite strange. If there’s a lamp here, the light has to come from that lamp. [Eugen] Schüfftan showed—as one of his students noticed—a lighted lamp and no light, just a surreal ray above it. That’s what I mean: if you can’t interpret light, then you have amateur photography. It’s so easy today with these new cameras to shoot a beautiful picture.

For the second and third part of this interview see here and here

– Marcel Carné on Children of Paradise: Forty-Five Years Later. For further resources on Marcel Carné and Children of Paradise, visit www.marcel-carne.com.

Theo Angelopoulos: Landscape and History

The Travelling Players (Directed by Theo Angelopoulos)

“The Travelling Players may be thought of as a meditation with three dimensions: history, myth and aesthetics. The viewer is constantly invited to alternate between emotional engagement and intellectual analysis.”

– Dan Georgakas, The Last Modernist: The Films of Theo Angelopoulos, 1997

Made under the watchful eyes of the last days of the Greek military junta, Theo Angelopoulos’s formally and thematically ambitious masterpiece follows an acting troupe in the war-torn years between 1939 and 1952 as they attempt to stage a production of the pastoral play Golfo the Shepherdess.

Highly stylised in its pageant-like movement through history, encompassing the Metaxas dictatorship, World War II and the Greek Civil War, the film is notable for its protracted and elaborately choreographed tracking shots. Reminiscent of the technique of filmmakers such as Max Ophuls and the Hungarian director Miklós Jancsó, these labyrinthine long takes wind tortuously around the actors and action, sometimes switching historical era within the same shot. The result is a radical and challenging chronicle of a nation’s recent history.

These same travelling players are encountered on the road by two vagrant children in search of their father in Angelopoulos’s later classic, Landscape in the Mist (1988).

The following is an extract from an interview with Theo Angelopoulos in 1974.

Q: When did you decide to shoot The Travelling Players, and what were the political circumstances at the time?

TA: We launched the film on the eve of the Polytechnic events. In any case, since the film deals with the 1939-52 period and refers to all sorts of unmentionable historical episodes, the Papadopoulos censors wouldn’t have been very likely to approve it. Nevertheless, we decided to go ahead and shoot the film. Shortly before we started, the Polytechnic incidents erupted in all their vio­lence followed by the Ioannides putsch. At this point we wondered whether it was worth making a film that might very well never be shown in Greece. And what would be the sense of such a decision? We discussed the matter with the producer, and he agreed with us that even if the film was to be banned in Greece, it would achieve its purpose through the echoes of its screenings abroad. In January and February 1974, as the terror was reaching its peak, we decided to go ahead with the film. We were prepared to make our film disregarding any censorship threats whatsoever.

Q: What was the original idea?

TA: I first thought about a travelling company touring the smaller towns around the country. A journey through the Greek landscape and history, following a group of actors from one town square to the next. Later, more elements were added like, for example, using the myth of the Atrides for the relations between the actors. I used an existing formula-father, son, mother, lover, their children . . . power . . . murder - which functions both as a myth and as a basis for the plot. It was a liberating decision, since I had made up my mind from the very beginning this was not supposed to be a lesson in history. The myth of the Atrides offered the option of a social unit that I could observe all through the period from 1939 to 1952. The Days of ’36 revealed the portrait of a dictatorship. The Travelling Players is a kind of se­ quel, giving names and specifications to this portrait. It goes up only until 1952, because I believe that year’s massacres put an end to the civil war and consecrated the triumph of the right wing and the victory of Papagos. That is, the story covers the period between the overt dictatorship of a general to the veiled dictatorship of a field marshal, who was viewed by many Greeks, exhausted by all the catastrophes they had experienced before, as a liberator.

There were a number of obstacles I had to overcome in order to achieve my purpose. First, to combine all these elements into one structure, but also to avoid conventional scenes of the kind you encounter so often in these cir­cumstances: hunger, death, persecutions, etc. For this reason, the film begins in 1952 with Pagagos’s election campaign. I wanted to portray the generation of the Resistance, the people who were against the Metaxas dictatorship, who fought in WW2, who joined the National Front of Liberation and retreated later into the mountains. All those who were forced by the events to take a stand and, finally, were considered the "Resistance generation" from the left­ist point of view, naturally. Three persons represent this generation in the film: the older 1939 militant and two younger persons suspected of sympa­thizing with this man and his opinions. All three of them join the Resistance and are arrested. One of them is deported and released in 1950 after signing an anti-communist declaration. The second is executed in 1951 for refusing to give up the armed struggle. The third falls ill in prison, is released for "health reasons," and will carry with him the "revolution trauma" for the rest of his life. Time has stopped for him in 1944; he constantly projects the events of that year into the future. The entire picture bears the stamp of this trauma. All the characters suffer from it. Some have signed the declaration, others have died in prison or lost their minds.

Q: You claim you used the myth of the Atrides to avoid the artificiality of a con­ventional arbitrary form. Aren’t you worried that such a myth, so deeply entrenched in the cultural traditions of our civilization, would create an opposite effect, by imposing on the film an inexorable fatality? You obviously wish to use the myth as an historical model, but it could lead to the wrong conclusions. Some people might take the film as another interpretation of the myth.

TA: To begin with, the presence of the myth is not that evident in the film. We do not use names, there is no Agamemnon, no Electra, no Pylade, not even a Nikos or Pavlos. The only name in it is Orestes, who for me is a con­cept more than a character: the concept of the revolution so many dream of. The affection many of the characters lavish on him represents their yearning for the ideal notion of the revolution. Orestes is the only one who remains faithful to himself and his goals, and is willing to die for them.

Q: Isn’t there a risk in identifying your protagonists with the heroes of the myth (Electra, Orestes, Aegisthus, Agamemnon, Clytemnestra) and then placing them in a different historical context?

TA: The motivations are different, the circumstances are not the same. His­ tory affects them, changes and transforms them. All I did is sketch them, and this helps me to define more accurately the historical space in which they are allowed to move. In the film, Aegisthus is a militant for the August 4 party and finds himself involved in pseudo-collaboration with the Germans. The concept of power is revealed in him by his attitude to the other actors, after the death of Agamemnon. Attempting to analyze his personal motivation would lead to a psychological drama about the primal reasons that made Aegisthus what he is. And that does not interest me at all. What I was trying to achieve is a kind of Brechtian epic, where no psychological interpretation is necessary.

Q: How did you put the script together?How did you use the myth in it?

TA: First of all, I tried to use the 1952 events as a point of departure. From that point, I looked back, but not in the classical flashback tradition, because these are not personal recollections of one definite character, but collective memories, giving me the freedom to plant inside the 1952 sequence certain historical episodes from the past. The first scene takes place in 1952, the last in 1939. As you can see, I am progressing in the opposite direction. In the final scene we see all the characters who participate in the film. Some of them, we know, have been already killed in action; others are in jail. The survivors are old by now; they have broken up, have been barely released from prison. They walk towards each other, they stop in front of the camera, and we hear the text of the beginning: "In the summer of 1939 we reached Aigion. We were exhausted, we hadn’t slept for two nights." The only differ­ence is the year-instead of 1952 in the opening scene it is now 1939. The characters here are still full of hope for the future, but we know what is in store for them. It’s like an old family picture we look at, knowing only too well what is going to happen to each of the persons in it.

Q: How did you select the historical events you wanted to show on screen?

TA: The choice of some dates and events is evident at first glance. The first "historical fact" we run into, in 1939, is the declaration of WW2. This "fact" affects everybody and is therefore introduced at a popular festivity, the actors and many other people being there at the same time. The German victory is represented by the capitulation of a small Greek garrison. The Liberation is seen through a popular revolt. Later, in December 1944, we have the mea­sures against possession of weapons, the civil war, and the elections of 1952. Also, when selecting the events, I preferred those I found to be most repre­sentative of Greek characteristics. For the 1944 events, it was the people in the street and the dimensions of their reaction I was concerned with, not the governmental decisions as such. The people consider December 1944 as their revolution, a revolution that was cut off in the middle, before it reached its natural conclusion. Why? My film does not offer a straightforward answer to the question, but there is plenty of evidence in it to find the answer. For instance, why didn’t the ELAS [The Greek Popular Army of Liberation] reach Athens? And there are more events we all know are part of the historical background of that period. Everything is shown through the perspective of simple people-the same people who have to bear the effects of these events. The film is a popular epic much more than an analysis of recent Greek his­tory.

Q: Unlike your first two films, the erotic element is of major importance in The Travelling Players. What is its significance in relation to the political elements in the picture?

TA: The sexual element is integrated in the characters. Clytemnestra’s affair with Aegisthus and Electra’s reaction are all based on their respective personali­ties. There is however a point when these relations stop being only personal, for Aegisthus is more than just the lover of the mother. He is also a traitor. He is killed not only because of his affair with Clytemnestra or because he has successfully ridded himself of Agamemnon, but for betraying Agammem­non and his son to the Germans. Electra’s rape is a political act as well. I believe that at the origins of every act of violence there is some kind of sexual impulse. Since Electra is raped in interrogation, the act becomes automati­cally political. The film also introduces the concept of prostitution. Chryso­temis is a prostitute who later marries an American soldier. This kind of marriage may solve a certain problem, but at the same time it represents the bankruptcy of moral values. The sexual element is therefore transferred to a political-ideological level.

Q: What does the stage play Golfo the Shepherdess, produced by the players in your film all over Greece, mean to you?

TA: The play functions on several levels. First, it is the means for these play­ers to make a living. But it is also art, since they perform it on stage. Then there is the text they use and the myth of the Atrides. The text is always interrupted at some stage and never completed on screen. And finally, add­ ing the historical background, the play itself gains another dimension. Let’s take, for example, one line from the play: "Are we being watched?" This doesn’t have anything to do with the popular drama anymore; it refers to the fate of the actors themselves, the characters of the film.

Q: It seems as if Golfo is the only play they ever perform. And you have to agree that both thematically and dramatically this is a very conventional play. Politically speaking, it rather mystifies instead of clarifying the true antagonism between so­cial classes. Don’t you feel there is a contradiction between the distinct political position of the actors themselves and the reactionary ideology of the play they keep producing?

TA: Golfo in nothing more than a convention, a Greek version of Romeo and Juliet. The actors are not really conscious of the conflict between their per­sonal politics and the ideology of the play. All they want is to make a living by offering their audience the kind of fare they like to see.

Q: What about the relations between theater and cinema? The stage sequences raise the question of realism, in the sense that an actor plays an actor who plays a role in a play, so what is real in all this?

TA: I have given a lot of thought to this matter. The actors play actors. Masks, costumes, sets, they are all extremely important elements. The change of costumes, for example. When the Englishman puts an actor’s beret on his head and gives the actor another hat in exchange, he becomes an actor in the play as well. When the British perform on the improvised set or sing "Tipperary," the actors are the audience. When Golfo is supposed to fall down, dead, a British soldier falls too, killed by a bullet, as if he, at this spe­cific moment, was playing the part of Golfo. Certain acts and events are re­peated all through the film and given more than one sense, and the performance of the play is never concluded because it is always interrupted by the political events taking place at the same time.

Q: Does your film adhere to a clear aesthetic concept established beforehand?

TA: Despite rumors that I have a definite aesthetic concept with which I will stick through hell and high water, I would like to insist on the fact that I do improvise a lot. In the film there are a certain number of very dynamic scenes featuring a large variety of actions, and also static scenes, the three mono­logues. Since I wanted to have one distinct aesthetic approach, I tried to com­pensate through camera movements in every possible instance, except for the theater production and the three tales. For these scenes, the camera stood still, facing the actors. The basic principle governing all the film is the se­quence shot, whether the camera is moving (which it is most of the time) or immobile. This way, the scenes gain much in depth and detail, with the edit­ ing being done inside the camera. We never shot two scenes, if we had the option of doing it in one.

Q: You feel much more comfortable with the sequence shot and prefer it to the traditional editing process.

TA: It is my own notion, possibly a very personal one. The sequence shot offers, as far as I am concerned, much more freedom, but it is true that the spectator needs to be more involved in it. There is another advantage I like in the sequence shot that you cannot have in traditional editing: the empty screen, when the action is implied, taking place elsewhere.

Q: We could say the sequence shot adopts the concept of montage but instead of using traditional editing, it combines together various elements in one scene, which, through the movement of the camera, stimulate the imagination of your spectators.

TA: It is equally important to mention that through the sequence shot it is possible to preserve both unity of space and unity of time. The film does not acquire an artificial pace at the editing table. Also, once you change the frame, it is as if you’re telling your audience to look elsewhere. By refusing to cut in the middle, I invite the spectator to better analyze the image I show him, and to focus, time and again, on the elements that he feels are the most significant in it.

Q: Did you encounter any difficulties during the production of the film?

TA: First of all, the weather. I was persecuted by beautiful weather. I needed a clouded sky-I couldn’t imagine the occupation under sunny skies. But Greece is well known for its magnificent weather and sunny sky, summer and winter alike. You can’t imagine how much trouble this was! When you have scenes where the first part is shot in Athens and the second in Amfissa, you need to have similar meteorological conditions; the mood, the atmo­sphere have to be as close as possible. And that is rarely evident in a film. On top of that, we went over budget, and worst of all, we were afraid of shooting this kind of film under the present conditions you are only too familiar with.

– A journey through Greek Landscape and History: The Travelling Players. Interview with Theo Angelopoulos by Michel Demopoulos and Frida Liappas, 1974.