User Reviews

"Days of 36" (1972) Dir: Theo Angelopoulos

I was led to "Days of 36" after reading about "The Travelling Players", Theo Angelopoulos' first major international success, highly regarded as one of the key European epics of the last fifty years. But I decided to see "...36" first as the opening part of a trilogy that "...Players" continues and, by all accounts, elevates to something far greater. This is not to say that "Days of 36" is a weak beginning, it's anything but. It has an assured self-confidence in the slow, deliberate way it tells this very confined story: a man is arrested for the assassination of a trade unionist, after which he manages to hold a politician hostage in the prison. The warden, the minister and several prison guards attempt to diffuse the situation, aware that their response will have political reverberations beyond the isolated incident itself.

The title is the only reference to the historical setting of the film, and no specific location is announced. The implications are clear; the viewer is assumed to know the significance of 1936 in Greek history. Whether this hostage taking really occurred or not, the incident is clearly supposed to be illustrative of a certain political and social situation that exists beyond the walls of the film itself.

"Days of 36" is calm, patient and strikingly impersonal. The sun beats down constantly upon anonymous uniformed men as they stride from building to crack-walled building, delivering messages, rendezvousing and deftly carrying out clinical official functions. Much of the 'action' (I use the word generously) takes place within the confines of a dusty prison, far from the regular society we see very little of. The accused assassin's lawyer ventures out into the barren streets and derelict buildings to find out who brought the gun to his client in jail. He finds no answers among the vague network of dispersed criminals. Tellingly, we never find out if his client actually killed the trade unionist or not - he swears he fired into the air.

The real point of the film is the minister's inability to end the situation without killing the hostage taker. He informs us that the Conservative Party and the Democratic Party are literally opposing each other on how best to deal with the situation, leaving the assembled team certain to upset at least one Party. When I found out that in 1936, Greece was on the cusp of its first period of 20th Century dictatorship, Angelopoulos' film made more sense - faced with a crucial problem that will affect the political balance of an unstable country, they decide to kill it. This film was made during Greece's second period of 20th Century dictatorship. I'll leave you to fill in the blanks.

All this leaves me with the question: if I have to research historical context in order to understand a film, why do I judge it a success? Well, it uses the architecture and landscape to visually bolster some very effective sequences, usually shot in very long takes. A failed breakout from the jail is set against near silent, rolling cornfields, as is an execution scene. The inmates rattling the bars on their windows after music is played in the yard, only to be dramatically silenced by the guards firing rifles in the air, is another key scene. "Days of 36" is unapologetic and uncompromising in its static approach to a story devoid of any real human element. Glimpses of emotional depth are hinted at, then passed by. Once I settled into the pace, I was not going to stop watching until I found out how the siege ends, and when I did I felt a little indignant and blank - not at the film itself, but at the anonymous uniformed men carrying out these actions; cold and workmanlike ad infintum.

A deeply political film, the first of Theo's highly acclaimed trilogy (the other films being "O Thiasos" and "Oi Kynigoi"). It was filmed during the second dictatorship Greece suffered during the 20th century (1967-1974), the scenery of the film being the first dictatorship, 1936-1941. The main element is that of cleistophobia, a cleistophobia directly associated with constant and poignant political instability that leads society to an existential crisis. An important point is that, although we can roughly infer the time of the narration, no temporal indication is discernible in the film. The film swings between the historical and a- or super-historical, giving an essence of universality, while making a direct and compelling political comment.

The scenery shown is limited.

The place where the unionist was assassinated (by Sofianos ??), the landscape where the prison stands, a marina, a seaside resort, another open landscape, where an inauguration takes place, and the prison. The prison is the central place of the narration, carries and conveys a loaded symbolic. I would classify the scenery by the words intramural and extramural, the intramural being the scenery of the prison and the extramural that of the other places. All have a political function. The intramural being the place where the crisis of the plot evolves, the extramural being a complement to the dismemberment taking place in the intramural. The long shots give a theatrical effect and a documentary style at times.

The film has a number of powerful scenes, of which i pick two out. The first is that of the music being played in the yard of the prison by request of Sofianos, giving rise to the second (less violent) prison riot. The second is the closing scene of the multiple execution, which completes a ring composition of assassinations at the beginning and at the end of the film, with death in a literal and in an abstract level being one of the main leitmotifs of the film.

Interestingly, the film was awarded the first national prize in the Thessaloniki festival in 1972. No comment.

Greek film director Theo Angelopoulos's 1972 film, Days Of '36 (Μερες του '36, or Meres Tou '36), is the least of the several films of his that I've seen. It is also, by over a decade and a half, the earliest of the films of his I've so far seen, and, at an hour and 45 minutes, by a good margin, the shortest as well. It clearly comes across as an 'early' work in the artists' canon, because, especially when comparing it to later works, one can clearly see the artist making decisions here and being unsure of their potential success. In many ways, the film most reminds me of the first film of Werner Herzog, Signs Of Life (save the Angelopoulos film is in color, not black and white). That film was set in the Greek Islands, and was also not dependent upon a talky screenplay. There are large portions of this often wordless film that could have worked quite well in the silent era. And when the mostly anonymous characters do speak, they speak in the way that the satiric characters from the best plays of Samuel Beckett do- in riddles and whispered asides that mean little at the moment of their utterance, but which may have great meaning in retrospect.

What propels the film to its success (limited as it is) are the aforementioned technical aspects of it, which differ substantially from the later films of Angelopoulos to which I am used to. There are not as many long takes that follow characters in and out of chronology, and the unobtrusive music, as mentioned, is quite a change from the electric, vivacious, and enriching scores Angelopoulos would later deploy in concert with Eleni Karaindrou. This film is considered part of a historical trilogy of films that Angelopoulos made early in his career. The other two installments are The Travelling Players and The Hunters, and only the former film is available on DVD at the moment, so I will watch it to see if it is a continuation of the themes and techniques this film brings, or if it was the beginning of a bridge to the later masterpieces that Angelopoulos would make. Yet, on its own merits, Days Of '36 deserves an audience, if not for the story it tells, nor how it is told, then for its wide variety of technical virtues that amply display the skills of a master of an art form, even very early on in his career. That even a 'failure' as this film is, on some levels, can boast such virtues, says much about how the difference between great artists and their great works of art vs. those of lesser artists is not really a difference of degree, but of kind, itself. That fact has rarely been better illustrated for the human eye. Thanks, Theo.