I giorni del '36

Theodoros Angelopoulos was probably Greece's finest film maker. He had an eye for the artistic and went on to develop a style that others could never even hope to emulate, with long shots, clever and alluring angles and a kind of cinematic poetry. This is his second full length film being made in 1972. It tells the story of Sofianos who is a former drug trafficker and police informant who is arrested for the assassination of a Trade Union leader.

Once in prison the local MP comes to his aid only to be taken hostage. What follows is how the authorities deal with the crisis - badly. Now this is set just prior to the Metaxas dictatorship but was made during the rule of the so called generals and as such there was censorship. So this is allegorical in terms of how it is taking a swipe at the incompetence of the authorities and the parlous state of liberty in Greece at that time.

The downside is that this is very slow and more is left unanswered than is ever even asked – if that indeed makes sense. There are the long shots the great camera angles and a cast of non actors. Some of the acting is wooden and some of the scenes are painfully staged. I like to think that this is deliberate to show the unreality, mundanity or even futility of how life then was. For a modern audience though this will be a hard watch. The print is excellent and looks like it was made only last year not in 1972. If you are an aficionado of cinema then you will want to see this, I appreciated it for its vision and other aspects as described above but at times I struggled with the pace; that having been said it has stayed with me, hence my rating.

An even more difficult and abstract film than Angelopoulos' debut "Reconstruction", his 2nd feature deals with a man arrested after a political leader is assassinated. The man seems to have been part of the assassination plot, but it is left somewhat ambiguous what his role was, if any. In jail he takes prisoner of an official who may or may not also be his cohort. While the hostage situation is at the very center of the plot, we are never in the room with the two men, and never know quite what is or isn't going on between them.

Tied directly to specific events in Greek history of 1936, when Greece fell into dictatorship (I suspect only a deeper knowledge of that history would have let me experience all the film's many levels),and made during the second period of dictatorship 30+ years later (and so had to be ginger in how blatant it's anti-government stance was) on the broader scope the film is about the desperate stupidity of power, seen here via the various odd ways in which those in power try to deal with the hostage crises; rendering them at first impotent, and then violent.

The pace is very slow. This is a comparatively short film by the director's standards, but actually felt longer than some of his epics. Without an emotional center or any character(s) we can identify with, using all non-actors, many of whom give fairly stiff performances, the film teeters on the edge between fascinatingly enigmatic and simply frustrating and confusing. It's all a metaphor for a society going wrong, for the rise of fascism, but it's convolutions, distant performances, and (for Angelopoulos) naturalistic visual style never really allows us inside as his later, greater, more poetic, theatrical and emotional works do.

But it is beautifully made, shot from always interesting angles. Angelopoulos had yet to fully embrace his trademark super-long, flowing elaborate takes, (often multi-minute mini-films within a film) but there is a step in that direction from "Reconstruction".

"Days of 36" is a transitional film, as Angelopoloulos starts to find the voice that would lead to his masterpieces, starting with his next film, "The Travelling Players", where his intellectual rigor would be balanced by an incredibly cinematic vision, and a sense of loss and pain, so one is drawn deeply in, even as you occasionally get lost on a literal level.

Not a great film, but an intellectually interesting one, and required viewing for anyone interested in the arc of the work of this great master of images. And I suspect, as with all this film-makers' dense films, I will only get more from it on repeated viewings.