Heroic Identity in the Dilessi Affair, Aris Velouhiotis, and Alexander: A Reading of Angelopoulos's Megalexandros

Theodoros Angelopoulos's Megalexandros might have achieved only mixed critical and popular success, but as an eye into Greek history the film provides a psychological autopsy of the Greek hero in his many contradictory guises and enables us to move through its several conflations and transformations to view Greek history in a newly striking light. This paper will examine the film's construction of heroic identity, an identity that has its roots in listes (the Dilessi affair), andartes (Aris Velouhiotis), popular culture (Karagiozis), and history (the historical Alexander the Great), providing a run-up of Greek history from the Hellenistic through the Byzantine period up to the 1940s. The ambiguous and often perplexing nature of Megalexandros is clarified in this paper as an historical pastiche that capitalizes on invented rituals, storying as a constructive technique, and resemblances that connect memory to yield a paranoid narrative. It is a narrative that speaks to a split heroic identity that both complicates history and is fractured by it. The hero is understood here as a complex double that confounds the monster-slayer with the monster and the hero with pariah in a narrative that emerges out of liberationist mythic Byzantine folk culture only to collapse into a failed text of Greek against Greek that can only end, as it does, in an anthropophagic feasting on the hero that cannibalizes the social fabric even as it enables a starved body politic to survive its savior.