Set in 1936 at the end of the Second Hellenic Republic, which had abolished the Greek monarchy, and right before the dictatorship of Ioannis Metaxas and his “4th of August” regime, Days of ’36, the first film in Angelopoulos’ history trilogy, follows a kidnapping and an absurd government crisis to a deadly conclusion. Angelopoulos shot much of the film in a former Turkish fort in Crete where communist political prisoners and freedom fighters had been tortured and killed in the civil war following the Greek liberation at the end of World War II, rather than in the mountainous regions of northeastern Greece he preferred. As a result, Days of ’36, a film of assassinations and executions, glints with a harsh Mediterranean light that pins corrupt bureaucrats and ineffectual politicians against a de Chirico backdrop of public squares, trapping them under floodlights in courtyards at night.