INTERPRETATIONS

Elio Petri’s films, or, De te fabula narratur!

The Petri retrospective in Film Programmes, November 2005

The author of the essays gives a critical comment of Elio Petri’s films in the context of political film in 1970s Europe, and the manner in which these films — lost at the turn of the 1990s — announced our reality at the beginning of the new millennium, when the reality presented in those films became acutely present; at the time of a »social spectacle« and global corporative capitalism, which is no more then a metastasis of capitalism described in Petri’s and similar political films. After a wider contextual insight in the tendencies of political film and European society of the 1970s, the author of the essay proceeds to analyse Petri’s films The Assassin (L’Assassino, 1961), We Still Kill The Old Way (A Ciascuno il Suo, 1967), The Working Class Goes to Heaven (La Classe Operaia Va in Paradiso, 1971) and In Each Way (Todo Modo, 1976) in the political and social context of Italy in the period these films allegorically refer to. In our era of globalisation neorealism and biopolitical deconstruction of humanity, Petri’s film cycle is a valuable experience for all those who wish to deliberate the surrounding world. The thematic is not only the corrupted, and deeply ideologically dissected picture of demochristian Italy of 1960s and 1970s, nor do the films appeal to the current Berlusconi’s; their actual message to neo-liberal global capitalism is: de te fabula narratur!

Marijan Krivak