“The Hunters reflects how a man of my generation sees Greek history, a history whose continuation blends with the years of my own life. It is a study of the historical conscience of the Greek bourgeoisie. In Greece, the ruling class is afraid of history and, for this reason, hides it. The Hunters starts from this premise.”
Theodoros Angelopoulos1
“Fredric Jameson credits Angelopoulos with the reinvention of a historical cinema, at a time when ‘such approaches to cinema were becoming ever scarcer’, and with a redrafting of the terms of realism. Jameson speculates ‘that it is the commitment to matter in his cinema which successfully neutralizes or at least suspends the fictive, while it is the commitment to perception and its temporalities which neutralises or suspends the documentary’. Jameson links the impact of Angelopoulos’ historical cinema to his work with temporality: ‘perhaps it is this distended temporality itself which allows for this realism of the interstices, between the scripted sequence of narrative events’."
Anne Rutherford2
