Reconstruction

Angelopoulos' first feature remains one of his finest films, and surely counts as one of the most remarkable debuts ever made. Set in a small village in the mountains of northern Greece, it charts the investigations made by both the police and a film crew (led by Angelopoulos ) into a man's death. With its three inconsistent 'versions' of the events leading to the murder (which echoes Clytemnestra's killing of Agamemnon), the film is at once a meditation on fact and falsehood, myth and history, storytelling and cinema, and a wondrously potent combination of noir-inflected passion and incisive social study: village life is as central to the film's interests as the characters themselves. One of the most beautiful black-and-white films ever shot (Giorgos Arvanitis was evidently already a master at this stage of his career), the film also intrigues for the way it anticipates, in several respects, Kiarostami's The Wind Will Carry Us. Sheer brilliance.