Petri

Where to start. Chris Knowles mentioned him in passing one day, and lent me a book on political cinema, don’t remember the name of the red covered book but it had a chapter on Petri, a chapter on Costa-Gavras. Maybe it wasn’t a book on political cinema, but contemporary cinema of that time, and everything was political.

Not sure why, but for some reason the idea of political cinema makes me think of an earnest endeavour with meagre production values. Move over prejudice, here comes Petri. The jib shots in the initial factory scenes of ‘La classe operia vai in paradiso’ (The working class go to heaven) were a revelation - dynamic camera work, cool framing and bingo I’m hooked.

So I looked up his films - and got these over time

and watched a few others on Mubi or elsewhere on the net.

So what’s great about these films? I’m often troubled by the fact that current societal issues were either born or discussed and predicted in the swinging sixties. Global warming, fossil fuel pollution etc are all hot topics doing the rounds amongst various commentators and intellectuals. But Italians like Pasolini and Petri were bang on the money as early critics of consumerism, which the former decries as an evolution of fascism

https://twitter.com/g_kallis/status/1201574911107588098?lang=en

the real fascism lies in this power of consumer society

Elsewhere, Vittorio de Seta was documenting the demise of pastoral community in the face of the modernising forces of consumerism, perhaps in a similar manner to Pema Tseden’s documenting of contemporary changes in Tibet, as traditional culture literally vaporises in real time.

Petri seems to be cut from the same cloth, and his movies artfully show the poverty of the powerless and the excess of those inside the system, with the teacher in The Teacher from Vigevano driven to drop his profession in order to ‘keep up with the jones’ driven by his wife’s lifestyle envy, or the innocent chap(s) tortured in Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion