Word: authoritarian
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Petri's portrait of Authority remains just that: the poetic evocation of images from murky psychic depths and from a conception of the authoritarian mentality as an autonomous entity. It remains stagnant, detached from the dynamic politico-economic context that created it. This is not to say, however, that Volonte is "unconvincing" in the realistic portrayal of an individual pig-figure. His characterization is in fact masterful in embodying the all-important humanist absolute, Ambiguity, as he transforms the cop smoothly, almost imperceptibly-within single shots-from an archetypal tyrant to a snivelling child. It is the very wholeness...
...dazzling immediacy. On the one hand he presents vast spatial compositions of dramatic confusion-interrogation theatres, modernist offices often shot through glass. Venetian blinds, bars, iron grates, cocktail glasses-creating an atmosphere of energetic but menaced licentiousness. On the other hand he devastates his defenseless audience with huge, authoritarian close-ups and compositions organized metonymically, transforming objects, into fetishes, frozen fascinations that dominate the image...
...perverse relation between the audience and their fetishized entertainment commodity, his film becomes an exciting, confusing, reassuring, self-inclusive Reality: an Artistic Whole, fascinating, hence demobilizing. Investigations of a Citizen Above Suspicion, with its metonymical distillation of the Power Structure into the isolated (and questionable) stereotype of the "Authoritarian Personality," dismisses practical ways of dealing with that structure politically, and-like Z-it breeds in us a self-righteous self-satisfaction with our own uncommitted brand of anti-Fascism. Our passivity is transformed only to the extent of our exploitation, as we thrill freely to the perverse...
...Mark C. Frazier '74 leader of RLA, said that members of the organization advocate life styles "ranging from capitalist individualism to syndicalist communalism," but that all of them support the building of an anarchic, anti-authoritarian society...
...takes girl-friend Emily to see Citizen Kane. discusses the film with her and his love-life with friends B. N. C. and Harvard culture-cultist Steve, takes his suit to the dry cleaners in preparation for a date at the Museum of Fine Arts with Emily, and meets authoritarian proprietor Kane and dissatisfied employee Manny Washington I, who takes Steve's suit to wear for an employment interview and who gets the job as a part of an exhibit at the Museum, but who loses the suit to playwright Francine and actor Bradford, who get it back...