The Hunters — Irene Bakola

Οι κυνηγοι

The body of a partisan lies ‘in state’ in the centre of a dance hall as the players take their seats facing it. Instinctively, two works of art are brought to mind; Peter Weiss’ courtroom play, The Investigation (based on the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials), and Rembrandt’s baroque study The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp.

Dr. Tulp’s society, in the early 1600s, saw itself as having emerged from an existential darkness into the light of undaunted epistemological zeal. Three centuries later, after the rejection of all faith and eschatology, modern society was delivered into the ceaseless spiral of introspection of a ‘mind reckoning with itself,’ as Arendt put it. The Hunters is precisely observing what occurs in the collective mind of a ruling class that has internalised the nothingness dwelling in the essence of its power. It is the trial that will be called upon here; the courtroom as a preeminently dramatic form, that will reveal the internal processes of a nation reckoning with itself. The Greek collective is thus forced into its much-delayed Vergangenheitsbewältigung.

The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp, Rembrandt

The catharsis we seek in this case is not the Aristotelian resolution, but the Brechtian verdict communicated through Angelopoulos’ emerging expressionistic aesthetics. The accused stand as representatives of a system-perpetrator, responsible for the partisan’s—still flowing—blood. The hunters are determined to cling onto their imaginary history, content to re-bury the living-dead, if it were to secure their parasitic existence. The hotel acts here as a physical manifestation of the historical no-place, where those devoid of political conscience are free to come and go, shifting through rooms and ideas in a vacuum of values. Unable to escape their ethical cowardice and existential immaturity, they are left to roam the endless corridors of history’s nightmare. Unarmed as they are, by their usual self-mythologisation, they can only identify themselves through their own estrangement; the very distance that separates them from their ego.

These conditions are of course purely Brechtian; all psychological interpretation excluded in the face of social structures. Empathy is not the goal anymore and mimesis acts as an indicator of the coercive forces of ideological oppression. Theatricality is called upon as a a formalist architecture emptied deliberately of all inner life in order to confront reality. In this case, reclaiming the real is to witness the alternative possibilities and wounded memories of history rise to the surface and re-materialise before the defendants’ eyes. The destabilisation of the nation’s history reveals the buried paths of memory that have thrown the present off course after their violent erosion. There are no flashbacks here, but rather dramatic instances in which moments from this ‘other’ history suddenly intrude upon the stage to re-enact the phantasms of subjugation.

The emphasis on the deceased body itself, is separated from any logic of mourning. Much like Rembrandt’s work, we are faced with a twist on Renaissance’s imagery of the body of Christ as the centre of the composition. Similar to Dr. Tulp’s colleagues, the hunters stare off into the distance, as if in search of the anatomical atlas mounted in front of the deceased, that eliminates all human aspects into schemes and diagrams. Though the corpse is open to contemplation, it is in a sense wished excluded. But the stage leaves no place to hide and the corpse of history, rolled in and out of the stage, transforms all dramatic action into a danse macabre of bourgeois denial. In Rembrandt’s case, the anatomically incorrect hand transforms the painting from an ode to scientific enlightenment into what Sebald calls the ‘archaic ritual of dismembering.’ This cruel misrepresentation at the exact centre point of the artwork’s meaning, is met here in the form of the bloody wound that appears abnormally fresh. This deliberate ‘flaw’ signifies the violence done to Yannis, the film’s very own Aris Kindt.

The Hunters arrives to the same conclusion as Voyage to Cythera: ‘Αυτό εδώ είναι ιστορικό λάθος’ (This is a historical mistake). So the body shall be buried anew, doomed to sink into exile and flower among the stones every time it re-surfaces.

Last Update: September 2024