Overview

Filmography

wikipedia

Elio Petri (January 29, 1929 - November 10, 1982) was a political Italian filmmaker.

Contents [hide]
1 Early Life
2 Early Films
3 Director
4 Final Years
5 External links

Early Life
Elio Petri was born in Rome on January 29, 1923 into a modest family, his father being a coppersmith. As the only son, he grew up in the working-class area of the city before attending school where he was noted for his intelligence.

After being expelled for political reasons from San Giuseppe di Merode, a school run by a priest on the Piazza di Spagna, he embarked on a career combining political militancy, film-journalism and the coordination of cultural activities for the youth organization of the Italian Communist Party. He wrote for L'Unità and for Gioventù nuova as well as for Città aperta. He left the party in 1956 after the Hungarian rising.

A friend of Gianni Puccini, he was introduced through him to Giuseppe De Santis and became Assistant to the director of Bitter Rice. He collaborated, without being credited for it, on Rome 11 O'Clock (1952), one of the least known post-war neo-realist movies, based on an actual tragedy; a staircase collapse with dozens of women job seekers who showed up in response to an advertisement by a doctor seeking a secretary.

Early Films
Mr. Petri carried out the preliminary inquiry among the real-life protagonists of the drama. The inquiry was published in book form in 1956. There followed the collaboration with De Santis, both as script-writer and as director's assistant, on La Fille sans homme (1953), Jour d'amour (1955), Homme et luops (1956), La strada lungo un anno (1958) and La Garconniere (1960). During the period, Petri also wrote scripts for Giuliano Puccini, Aglauco Casadio and Carlo Lizzani. Nevertheless, it was his collaboration with the film-director from Fondi which was decisive when it came to learning the tools of the film-directing trade as well as developing an autonomous cultural and political outlook.

Director
All his life, Petri remained deeply attached, both politically and personally, to Beppe De Santis. After two shorts, Nasce un campione (1954) and I sette contadini (1959), which gave him the opportunity to broaden his knowledge of film-making 'on the job' as was the usual course in those days, Petri made his debut as a director with L'assassino (The lady killer of Rome) based on a script co-authored with Tonino Guerra in 1961. Already in this film, Petri's gift for portraying alienated characters, for conjuring up a Kafkaesque thriller mood, is evident.

I giorni contati (1962), his second film, again co-authored with Tonino Guerra sets the pattern: Petri's filmic world is political by allusion and dominated by the themes of exclusion and divided lives. After two somewhat lesser films Il maestro di Vigevano, (1963) and the sketch Sin in the afternoon, included in High Infidelity, 1964, Petri directed The 10th Victim (1965), a film with futuristic overtones also co-authored with Tonino Guerra. In 1967, he shot We still Kill the old Way (adapted from the homonymous novel by Leonardo Sciascia), one of the most poignant of his works dealing with the individual's inability to cope with realty. The film also marked Gian Maria Volonte's entry into Petri's expressive world and the beginning of the collaboration with the script-writer Ugo Pirro which was to last until 1973.

With A quiet place in the country, the last of his film to be co-authored with Guerra, he tackles the subject of solitude and the artist's romantic agony. He then directed four films which showed that he was one of the most acute, lucid and despairing analysts of the schizophrenia of our time. These films constitute, as it were, a portrait of all the facets and contradictions of Italian society: Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (1970), the subject of which is the police-force; The Working Class Goes to Heaven (1971), on the worker's condition; Property is no longer a theft (1973), about the role of money in our society and how power destroys the individual: Todo Modo (1976), adapted from the homonymous novel by Leonardo Sciascia is about the warped psychic structure of the power moguls among the Christian Democrats. Pointing out as it does all the danger of conformism in politics, culture and communications technology, Petri's work increasingly came up against production obstacles. The ideological violence of Investigation of a citizen above suspicion almost caused the film to be definitely banned.

In 1978, putting aside those topics that were direct reflections on contemporary Italian society, Petri directed for the television a remarkable version of Sartre's play Dirty Hands, in which, once again, Marcello Mastroianni gave an exceptional performance. For the reason of copyright the film has not been released outside Italy.

With Buone Notizie (1979), which Petri himself produced together with Giancarlo Giannini, the main character in the film, Petri reached an impasse: the joint inability of the artist and his character to convey their suffering and dismay.

At a time when sociopolitical and psycoanalytical methods were converging in an attempt to better define the crisis in western societies, Petri tries to interpret the field of the unconscious. More in the line of Sigmund Freud and Wilhelm Reich than Karl Marx, he is one of the directors who have done most to renew the political approach to man's problems, to his social insertion. Ranging from neuroses to schizophrenia, Petri's world is one of the most coherent and stimulating where a film-director's commitment to his implicit audiences is involved. The work, however, took its toll on Petri.

Final Years
Like his own characters, he was a constant prey to existential doubts and anguish. The last years of Petri's life were overshadowed by the difficulty he experienced in getting a new film-project under way, and by the onset illness. In 1981, Petri went to Geneva to produce Arthur Miller's new play The American Clock. It was to be his sole incursion into the theatre domain. Work on another film, Chi illumina la grande notte was well advanced: the takes were scheduled for September 1982 and Marcello Mastroianni was to play the leading role. But his illness too was far advanced: Elio Petri died prematurely of cancer on November 10, 1982. He was 53 years old.

External links
Elio Petri web-site
IMDb entry

(See here)

01 IMDB-2

The final scene in Elio Petri's 1970 Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion concludes with a quote from Kafka's The Trial: "Whatever he may seem to us, he is yet a servant of the Law; that is, he belongs to the Law and as such is set beyond human judgment." What Petri has left out from this excerpt is also that "to doubt his integrity is to doubt the Law itself". The "he" in question here is the man of the Law – the police inspector – played brilliantly, hair slicked back et al, by Gian Maria Volontè. Without any scruples, we see the Inspector coldly cut his mistress's throat with a razor between the sheets in a kinky role-playing romp, sans scruples, only to prove to himself if he is, as he believes, a citizen above suspicion and beyond the Law which he so firmly adheres to.

This complex film is a cinematic gem thanks to its multifarious tropes – at times absurd black comedy, at times vitriolic political satire, at times psychological study into sexual fetishism and power. Of course, all of these themes intermingle so effortlessly that you can't help but be taken aback by the richness of Petri's byzantine vision. The left-leaning director here depicts the autocratic terror that overtook Italy in the late 60s, an overture to the tense, decade-long period known as the "years of lead" in Italian politics – a time of fascist repression and a struggle between the equally-as-extreme left and right of center parties.

Beyond its political overtones (which are universal yet now paradoxically outdated, as we see rebellious students waving their little red Maoist books around to anger the "fascist pigs" in the police force), Investigation plays its strongest and most universal hand in its view of authority, and specifically, those that wield an ungodly amount of it. The Inspector, in a snug, black suit, commands and degrades his subordinates, yet in the way a responsible teacher would reprimand a naughty student. That is, he believes his own righteousness and position, and here, once he commits the murder of Augusta Terzi (the stunning Florinda Bolkan), he leaves the Law to spin its wheels of Justice, having full confidence in the organ of power that commands him. As the Inspector sits in the office of his boss, the Commissioner (a sleazy Gianni Santuccio), he trembles like a child, waiting for approval and acceptance. After the latter admits to having an affair with the murdered victim, the unperturbed Commissioner asks him amidst a smoke-filled smirk, holding a cigar in his fat fingers, "So, was she, you know? Any good?" Here we can make the link between power and sexual impotence, as the simple reason the Inspector kills his lover is because she has brought to light his personal inadequacies as a man. An individual who holds such dominance over others, who commands such authority, is an addictive aphrodisiac for Bolkan's underwear-hating heroine, but after a while, she sees her Inspector is nothing more than a capricious child obsessed and deceived with a position of power that holds no integrity and no truth. For her, his sexual appeal has vanished, the organ of dominance has grown limp, as the incongruity between the Inspector's projected image and his actual self begins to grow. She hates his little black socks, his dull black suit, and his overall bureaucratic appearance. In a few great satirical moments, we see the impressionable Inspector strolling the streets in a trendy new khaki suit, a purple silk ascot, fashionable sunglasses – a caricature of Italian culture to the fullest.

So what prompts Volontè's Inspector to make his final decision? Is he a stern follower of the Law who wants to test it and prove himself superior to his inept colleagues; a sadistic neofascist bureaucrat who lives for control and subjugation of others; an infantile with a bruised ego thanks to an untamable feminine force? Are we, as viewers, not to question his actions, but simply to accept them as necessary because he's "a man of the Law", superior to us, despite his faults, as Kafka leads us to believe…or is that just Petri's tongue-in-cheek humor getting the best of us? That's the fun of this great film, and the kookiness of Ennio Morricone's twangy score adds to the comical effect of a dark and witty étude into power, sex, and politics. (See here)

02 WIKI

Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (Italian: Indagine su un cittadino al di sopra di ogni sospetto) is a 1970 Italian film crime drama directed by Elio Petri. It is a dramatic, psychological, black-humoured satire on corruption in high office, telling the story of a top police officer who kills his lover and then tests whether the police would accuse him for this. During the movie, he is seen planting obvious clues while the other police officers ignore them, either intentionally or not.

The film was highly regarded in its own time, winning the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, and both the FIPRESCI Prize and the Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. Also it won as Best Foreign Language Film at the Kansas City Film Critics Circle Awards 1971. Today the film stands well, thanks to its intelligent composition.

Volonté performed one of his most celebrated roles as the idiosyncratic, nervous police inspector, portraying a clichéd authoritarian southern Italian police functionary.(See here)