The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, September 14-20
Shepherds of Calamity (1967)
Directed by Nikos Papatakis
Allegedly filmed underground during the Colonels’ Dictatorship in Greece, Papatakis’s sophomore feature looks at the retrograde societal mores on which the military grip of reactionary juntas rely to harvest consent. The archetypal tropes of Romeo and Juliet are relocated to the Greek countryside, where a peasant cannot marry the daughter of the local landlord as per the unwritten rules of class and moral hypocrisy. But our restless peasant, very much like the director, will not settle for less as the stormy love story spins of out the established control in a film that combines the impetus of expressionism with the lineaments of neorealism. Shepherds of Disorder is a rare opportunity to watch one of the only five movies that the stateless Greek director made in his long and intrepid life—in which cinema played a minor but indelible part. Giovanni Vimercati (September 20, 8pm at Tenant416)