The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, July 13-19
Reconstruction (1970)
Directed by Theo Angelopoulos
The late Greek master Angelopoulos followed a path from realist to mystic, with his movement into the world of international stars and co-productions coinciding with one towards broader considerations of memory, mortality, and time. From the beginning of his filmmaking, though, his efforts to register the earthy, rocky daily lives of many Greeks also possessed an allegorical impulse, as evidenced by his first feature. The black-and-white neorealist Reconstruction takes place in a rain-swept village whose population, we are told, has dwindled from more than 1,200 to less than 100 over the course of a quarter-century. One of the departed inhabitants (played by Mihalis Fotopoulos) went to Germany as a guest worker, and then was murdered by his wife (Toula Stathopolou) and her lover (Yannis Totsikas) upon his return. The bulk of this film (which was made soon after a military dictatorship had assumed control of Greece) is given over to efforts to comprehend recent history through reenactments of the crime—by visiting police, by an encroaching TV news crew, by judgmental residents, and ultimately by the flashback-proffering film itself. They all work together to signal that a tragic rupture has taken place, with the threat of a rural lifestyle’s death looming in the wake of a loss of life. Aaron Cutler (July 17, 12:30pm at the Museum of the Moving Image’s Angelopoulos retrospective)
