Although set in the days preceding the dictatorship of General Metaxas, Days of '36 challenges 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 a Conservative MP hostage, creating an embarrassing and increasingly absurd scandal for the authorities. With his characteristic 360-degree pans, Angelopoulos describes the circular process of trial and error, incompetence and tyranny, through which Order is restored. But he also proscribes a space that imprisons viewer and characters alike in what must be one of the most tightly composed films ever made. This is a cinema of absences, of whispers, of "dead spaces" sandwiched between periods of action, as Angelopoulos characterizes his own work. "The dictatorship," he has said, "is embodied in the formal structure of the film. Imposed silence was one of the conditions under which we worked (and) the spectator realizes that censorship is involved."