Macedonian Wedding

The cinematic eye recorded local customs and traditions, but not with the ideological bias of a Germanic Volkskunde that sought to justify preconceived notions about the noble savages inhabiting the mountains. On the contrary, Kanellopoulos explored human interactions, ritualistic patterns, and states of mind in an effort to foreground common spaces, gestures, and interactions where patterns of social cohesion and individual behavior converge. He repeated his achievement in his other two documentaries, Thasos (1961) and Kastoria (1969), descending into an unfamiliar Greece, replete with shadows, demonic presences, and dark primitive rituals, in an attempt to find the underlying emotional texture of human culture in its most pristine, pre-civilized authenticity.