The frame is set up. Someone enters. Action occurs. The camera follows the action. The sequence ends or is interrupted. People leave. Someone remains.
This cinematic sequence is repeated many, many times in Alexander the Great. It becomes mesmeric. The viewer is always an active participant in the action, attentive for clues and details. Each set-up is a minor mystery which may or may not be resolved. This is evident from the very first shot, which we are informed happens at the dawn of the twentieth century, as a great house sits in darkness, remains in darkness, and then, of a sudden, the lights are switched on, people appear in profile in the windows, the world is alive, the sequence ends.
The story itself is deceptively simple and in so many ways it feels as though Costa Gavras’ recent Adults in the Room contains echoes of Angelopoulos’ epic. A group of British aristocratic capitalists are kidnapped by Alexander, a legendary brigand, who takes them to his mountain village, which is undergoing a radical egalitarian program. Some Italian anarchists arrive, seeking shelter. The political-military machine starts to close in as the British send gunboats to the Greek shore. Tensions rise in the village and the villagers turn on Alexander. There is an assassination attempt. Alexander seizes absolute power. Anyone who tries to flee the village, including the anarchists, are killed by the military. The film ends with Alexander taking the lives of his hostages before he is killed in a sequence reminiscent of Mifune’s demise in Throne of Blood.
This is an epic narrative, which plays out over the course of nearly three and half hours. What this timeframe permits the director to do is twofold (at least). On the one hand it emphasises the epic aspects of his vision. Alexander’s story is played out in the shadow of his namesake and in a Greece to come, with a child named Alexander escaping the village and, in a final shot, approaching modern day Athens. The story of Alexander, with its greatness and its flaws, is destined to be repeated endlessly. The length of the film also allows the director to immerse the viewer in the complex world of this simple village. We come to understand the geography of the village, its bridge, its central square with a tree, its cliff facing the river, like the back of our hand. We know how they dance, how they celebrate, how they argue. The village is the other character, the counterpoint to Alexander, whose aspiration to greatness struggles to come to terms with the notion of the free social individual, it can only function within a wider concept of power.
This is movie making on a grand scale, with a socially conscious political drive which would appear to have been more or less eliminated from the cinema, sublimated to the more narrative driven demands of TV series. It is cinema in the tradition of Eisenstein, Gance and Griffith. The Bertoluccis, the Tarkovskis, the Ciminos - those who saw cinema as a canvas on which to paint examinations of great social upheaval and complex political order, have been exiled.
