(Meres tou '36). Angelopoulos' first overtly political film is set in 1936, in the days preceding the dictatorship of General Metaxas, but it reverberates with challenges to the dictatorship under which it was made. A trade unionist is assassinated at a workers' rally and a former police informer, Sofianos, is charged with the murder. In prison, he takes hostage a Conservative MP, creating an embarrassing and increasingly absurd scandal for the authorities. When "reason" and threats fail, they attempt to dispose of Sofianos, first clumsily, then with devastating accuracy. With his characteristic 360-degree pans-traveling shots that "move through time as well as space" as Tony Mitchell observes-Angelopoulos describes the circular process of trial and error, incompetence and tyranny, through which Order is restored. In Days of '36, Angelopoulos' Brechtian style finds its most integrated exposition. His is a cinema of absences (the prisoner is hidden behind his cell door throughout much of the film), of whispers, of "dead spaces" sandwiched between periods of action, as Angelopoulos characterizes his own work. "The dictatorship," he has commented, "is embodied in the formal structure of the film. Imposed silence was one of the conditions under which we worked. The film is...made in such a way that the spectator realizes that censorship is involved."