(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
The 15. and 16. April is the Italian political film on the Cinematekets program in Oslo with both seminar and film screenings. One of the central directors is Elio Petri and his film Survey of a citizen raised above any suspicion: With links both to the social engagement of neorealism and to Kafkas process Petri shows how power alienates the individual, and how film can be a direct political tool to uncover this phenomenon.
When you talk about Italian film today, you often talk about the golden age of Italian film – neorealism. What few know, however, is the political film that emerged in the wake of, but with clear lines of connection with, neorealism. The neorealist film not only renewed Italian film, but also the international film after World War II. After movies like Roberto Rossellini's Rooms open city (1945) and Vittorio de Sicas Bicycle Thieves (1948), a number of films were produced that focused on current social themes, which challenged dramaturgical and cinematic norms, and thus approached a documentary style. Instead of constructing dramatic intrigues with professional actors, filmmakers should now take the cameras out into the streets and make contact with social reality. This resulted in a politicization of the film medium – a politicization that goes like a red thread through Italian film history, and which saw a violent boom in the so-called "lead years" 1968–1980, when terror and violence characterized Italy: the bombings on Piazza Fontana in Milan in 1969, then in Brescia in 1974 and on the express train between Florence and Bologna the same year, before culminating in the kidnapping and killing of former Prime Minister and Christian Democrat Aldo Fun on March 6, 1978, and the bombing at the Bologna train station in 1980.
Increased inflation, reduced production, market competition and oil boycott created political and social turmoil during these years. Corruption and scandals intensified the distrust the people had for government, political parties and trade unions. The political film grew in Italy as a direct response to this crisis, and to the inability of the government to act on behalf of the people.
A direct political tool. The political film that prevailed during these years remained true to the social engagement of neorealism. At the same time, it called for greater action in the breach of trust between the people and the state, and the loss of traditional values was a fact. In addition to the internationally renowned Pier Paolo Pasolini and Bernardo Bertolucci, the leading filmmakers of Italian political film were directors such as Elio Petri, Francesco Rosi, Marco Bellocchio, Giuliano Montaldo, Ermanno Olmi and the Taviani brothers. All of these directors have strong lines of connection to neorealism, but focused more than their predecessors on critical realism, political issues, and ideology. The film should no longer only show reality as it appeared, but also free the individual from oppression. Thus, the film was now a direct political tool in the struggle to free the individual from the alienation of capitalism. Francesco Rosi and Elio Petri in particular stand out as the leading directors of Italian political film. But where Rosis films are often linked to a specific Italian reality, Elio Petri's films are more philosophical and entertaining, and more accessible outside the country's borders.
The master of political film. Elio Petris' (1929–1982) formal film education is limited. After working as a film critic and screenwriter, he made his directorial debut in 1961 with the film L'assessino. But it was not just the film that captured Petri. He had spent his youth as a militant in the Italian Communist Party. Despite his lifelong interest in social and political issues, he resigned from the Communist Party when the Soviet Union invaded Hungary in 1956. In the recently published book Elio Petri and Italian political film (Mimesis Edizioni, 2015), Petri answers the question of whether he was still a communist in 1979: “To be completely honest, I can not say that. Not because the Communists themselves do not consider me a communist, but because being a communist, with my previous experiences as a militant, means accepting the party's regulations – and thereby undermining any subjective opinion one has, in favor of the party. That is, to live, minute by minute, for the party and on the party's premises. "
To that, Petri was too subjective, too independent, and perhaps in time also too bourgeois. And if one takes into account that the Italian Communist Party was the largest in Europe at that time, it eventually represented the institution of power Petri himself wanted to illustrate and distance himself from. Petri goes on to say in the book that he started with film because it was an art form that belonged to the people, and thus by definition was in opposition to the alienation of power by the individual. It so happened that the film for Petri became a political tool in the struggle to free man from the oppression of the institutions of power.
As in Kafka's parable "Before the Law", Petri tells how the culprits are above any law, and with it every suspicion.
Just as Leonardo Sciascia was among the first to put the name and address of the mafia and show the world how the branches of crime went far into the state, church, trade and nobility, among peasants and village workers in Italy, Elio Petri was the director who showed how the institutions of power alienated the individual. The best and foremost example of this is his above mentioned film Survey of a citizen raised above any suspicion from 1970, for which he won an Oscar for the same year.
Power and powerlessness. While Pasolini in his newspaper article "I know" in the newspaper Corriere della Sera in November 1974 proclaims that he knows the names of those responsible for the massacres in Milan, Brescia and Bologna, but lacks the evidence, the opposite is true in Petri's film Examination. As in Kafka's parable "Before the Law", Petri tells how the culprits are exalted above any law, and with it every suspicion. In the film, Petri not only reflects on how political and non-political crime – the legalized and the institutionalized – approach each other and thus reduces anyone guilty to an innocent, but also how the game of power is alienating.
Examination is with its references to Kafkas process a thriller of the rare, and represents one of the foremost examples of political film of this period. The course of action is relatively simple, and is mainly related to how the police inspector (Gian Maria Volonté) kills his mistress Augusta Terzi (Florinda Balkan) and still goes free. The question of guilt is therefore central, just as with both Pasolini and Kafka. The difference is that the question is thematized through play and through the father-child relationship. Besides Ennio Morricone's sometimes slightly surreal music, it is the infantile play between the police inspector and his mistress, and later between the inspector and his police colleagues, that drives the action forward. Already in the film's opening sequence, the question of guilt is made clear: Through a series flashbacks one sees how the police inspector, who has just been appointed as political security officer, interrogates his mistress as if she were a prisoner; depicts her as if she were evidence in a murder case; comes with information that reduces her to a child who obediently follows her father's order – until she points out that he himself is the child. She teases him by asking how he is going to kill her this time, and breaks that game's rules. He kills her in a way that in this context can not be characterized as anything other than a "father murder". Then – as if to clear his conscience, or as a child who wants to be discovered and punished – he plants the evidence in hopes of being caught. This is how the game and the game of power continue with his party and police colleagues. When all the evidence points in his direction, he retreats to the home, loosens his tie and dreams a dream in which he admits his guilt. But instead of judging him, his colleagues simply content themselves with pinching his cheek, like a child who has not proved worthy of his good father until he declares his innocence.
Alienating Ende. When the police inspector wakes up from the dream and sees the police arriving, the events will be repeated in reality as in the dream. Unlike Josef K., who in process standing before the law, he is exalted above it. By blurring the line between dream and reality, guilt and innocence, alienation and freedom, Petri ultimately reduces the institution of power and its people to an infantile state, which is deprived of any question of guilt and raised above all suspicion. In this way, Petri not only picks up the thread from the social and political involvement of neorealism, but goes further in his quest to uncover how the game of power is alienating.
That the choice fell on actress Gian Maria Volonté (1933–1994) as the police inspector was hardly coincidental. Volonté had not only been successful with Sergio Leone's film For en neve dollar (1964), but was a political activist known for his left-wing radical views. Volonté thus became one of Italian political film's most sought-after actors. Besides Examination he appeared in many other political films during the same period. Volonté became in many ways the face of Italian political film, and a figure it is recommended to get acquainted with in several of the films at the Cinematheque this weekend.
The weekend seminar on Italian political film kicks off on 15 and 16 April Cinemateket in Oslo.
