Word: petry
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Directed by ELIO PETRI Screenplay by UGO PIRRO and ELIO PETRI...
...novel-is the work of the gifted Mike Hodges, whose two previous features (Get Carter, Pulp) displayed a cool virtuosity. There are pyrotechnic scenes-the operation itself being the most dazzling. But the film does not really succeed beyond its embellishments. It has all the depth of a petri dish...
...only film industry which seems to have overcome its skittishness over politics is the Italian. Bellochio, Petri, Pontecorvo, Bertolucci have all made films which transform tough social criticism, by passion and human perception, into art. Even Italian hacks, like Montaldo of Sacco and Vanzetti fame, are hacks on a higher plane. If American film is to mature, its maturity will come from those able to confront Kramer's value system and erase its sigma from socially-conscious flimmaking. As Robert Steel said (in New American Review...
...ambiguity of his visual expression reveals an anarchic temperament (to be distinguished from an anarchist politics ). Petri shifts rapidly between shots of rich chaos and those of extremely centralist organization, both invested with a 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...
...dark theatre by a passive, alienated mass, film already constitutes a mystical, reified object, a spectacle that obscures the conditions of its production: that it is man-made, that it isn't a Larger-than-Life-Reflection-of-Reality, that it is merely a celluloid construct. The Hollywood artistry Petri employs, and the Ideology of Ambiguous Truth he promotes, reinforce the 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...