In academic circles, historical study has until very recently been implicitly structured according to the Great Man theory—the notion that monumental figures have an overarching influence on guiding sociopolitical destinies, both great and small. Which is why Lincoln is single-handedly credited with winning the Civil War and FDR is almost exclusively pitched as guiding this country out of the Depression. Historical epics helmed by American studios are rooted in the same. Gettysburg, Patton, even Gladiator are steeped in the tenets of individual determinism, firmly believing that individual actors can overcome history and bend it their respective wills. Rare is the case where a “little guy” becomes the focal point in Hollywood cinema, and when he does (Forrest Gump), it’s almost always farce.

The Weeping Meadow, directed by the ageless Greek master Theo Angelopoulos, is a remarkable departure from the cinematic equivalent of the Great Man theory. It takes as its subject matter the minor figures that are inexorably and haphazardly buffeted by history’s sweeping currents—in this case, perpetual refugees whose lives are dictated by the worst 30 years in Greece’s otherwise glorious past. In place of “epic” characters, Angelopoulos’s scope is sweeping, visually and temporally, from the first to the last, capturing moments and images of surpassing affect and beauty. The first: a long shot of Odessa refugees arriving on a bleak shore outside of Thessaloniki. They trudge toward the camera, Spyros, leading his young son Alexis hand-in-hand with Eleni, a war orphan, in front of the weary crowd; these figures that were once a lumpen, undifferentiated mass dwarfed by the horizon slowly become individually discernable figures and dominate the frame—the film’s fundamental metaphor. The moment, like so many throughout The Weeping Meadow, is breathtakingly, hypnotically drawn out, and fraught with meaning: trapped on a marshy field between an un-fordable river in the foreground and the tempestuous ocean behind, these people have nowhere to go. And there’s something mystical about it too. Suitcases still in hand, Spyros and his followers have clearly just disembarked, but without a steamer ship evident anywhere on the horizon, it’s as if they were belched directly from the roiling seas. So begins a tale suffused with myth and history.

Throughout The Weeping Meadow, Angelopoulos repeatedly elides massive stretches of time, always without warning. From the extended opening shot, we cut to several years later when Alexis and Eleni are sexually precocious young adolescents, and then past still more years when they are young adults of marrying age. Yet the natural wedding does not occur, and the barely mature Eleni is instead betrothed to greying Spyros. Understandably distraught, Eleni flees her insulated outpost of a town with Alexis, and they elope to Thessaloniki, pursued by an increasingly desperate Spyros. Living off Alexis’s income as a talented yet itinerant accordion player, and eventually reunited with their twin sons—it’s strongly hinted that, as an adolescent, Eleni was forced to give them up for adoption—our young lovers are battered by and unable to escape the prevailing winds of their contemporaneous circumstances. The events are depressingly bleak, including World War II, Italian occupation, the ascent of fascism, and a bloody civil war.

Instead, the camera is given the kind of agency usually reserved for human protagonists. Perpetually tracking around, towards, and away from (and frequently beyond) Eleni, Alexis, and their compatriots (there is not one stationary shot throughout), the camera is given a restless, meandering independence that its subjects are not. It is a traveller liberated from the limitations of normal space, unfettered to any individual perspective or subjectivity; there is a sense that manifold similar stories are occurring simultaneously, that this particular one is randomly chosen from the mix. The Weeping Meadow, then, becomes a quasi-objective document of life lived primarily out of doors. I can’t recall any locale through the entire, sprawling three hours that was truly private. While on the run, the young lovers inhabit a theater, whose private boxes are converted to individual dwellings by hanging bed sheets; Alexis’s conferences with his band-mates are conducted in a factory shell vulnerable to the wind and rain; and when Alexis returns home to bury his father, some anonymous locals—believing that the elopement and Spyros’s despair from it eventually killed the patriarch—break the windows of his ancestral home in retribution, effectively collapsing public and private space.

Even so, Angelopoulos for the most part resists the maudlin sentiment that usually accompanies tales of fractured, marginal lives. There are tragedies—deaths, departures, and disappearances—but Angelopoulos’s breathtaking compositions are imbued with the heft of mythology and freighted with symbolism, meaning that they are taken with much more equanimity. The stoicism of wind-blown black flags borne on a funereal flotilla or the grotesque beauty of dead sheep strung from a tree are breathtaking (a word often overused, but The Weeping Meadow’s visuals have the rare effect of making a theater seem airless) but function as synecdoche for something grander. They are exemplars of the ineffable weft of history, emblems of tortuous growing pains experienced during the rebirth of an ancient nation.