Days of ’36

During the 1970s Angelopoulos made films that were formally challenging and highly stylised; on occasion these used the narrative conventions of the political thriller to a very different effect to the slick films that make up the majority of this season. In Days of ’36 an imprisoned murderer takes a government official hostage in prison sparking a political crisis. Full of Angelopoulos’ trademark symmetrical compositions, this reads like a thriller but through the director’s use of film form resists the normal pleasures of the genre.