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Oh, how wonderful it is to talk about such famous films, meaning I don't have to add the film's name and all the data is ready and waiting! This commendable energy saving makes me happy, although I run a high risk that the nonsense I spout will be unanimously labeled as such without any benefit of the doubt. So, I preface by saying we are slightly stepping out of my genre here (what genre? Stuff that is born to be strange, without aspiring to be, I don't know, a good film for everyone). But I'll show you right away that we can fix that.
I was speaking of 'strange' films. I think the way I approached cinema was through so-called mind-fucking movies, those with Jared Leto like Requiem for a Dream or Mr. Nobody. Then I always looked for titles that respected the same dynamics, with protagonists on the edge of madness, non-linear plotlines, the shifts of temporal planes, and the close-up shots that give you a headache. After a while, I grew tired of this genre, especially the mix of philosophy and sci-fi, like Donnie Darko or The Butterfly Effect, or I Origins, which always seemed to me like yet another reproduction of something already seen, aesthetically fascinating but always half the same fundamental idea. To generalize, right. But you never forget your first love, and if you like certain standards of beauty, in the end, you always look for them, perhaps trying to associate them with a better character. So I went from a commercial alternative to one with no chance of retrieval, from Jared Leto and Jake Gyllenhaal (who also gave his all, even with Villeneuve, with psychological thrillers) to Adam Driver (who I think is seriously crazy in real life too).
But what does all this digression have to do with La classe operaia va in paradiso? No! Gian Maria Volonté doesn't make the list, we're on another level, let's say. Although I've only seen it for the first time now, what I believed was that it was a political, social, maybe denunciation film. I think perhaps everyone who has seen it, with more precise words than mine, would frame it in this definition.
Instead, for me, it was a surprise: what I found in front of me was a dystopian, exaggerated, maniacal film, bordering on madness. A very theatrical film, where by theatrical I mean that the actors act as if they were in front of an audience, like a preacher before a crowd, so my meaning of theatrical is certainly not technical, because I mean exuberant, extravagant. Essentially, exactly one of those films I love!!!
Speaking of the plot, Elio Petri not only tells the life of the workers inside the factory but the clash between socialists and communists, the rift within the workers' movement of which the victim is the movement itself, and therefore for me, we already move to a complexity, historical and social, superior, to a more accurate representation of a social slice, that does not limit itself to the eternal dialectic of master-servant but instead highlights the internal struggles between workers, the divergences of interests between workers and students, the difficulty of finding meaning in the struggle, a reason to fight, to not lose hope in the possibility of improving their life conditions. The lobotomization of the worker is the fundamental theme, Petri focuses on the man, on his suffering; the human sphere and the social one are inseparable. As the author of the chosen definition for Petri writes here, his cinema - I can speak of this, his, film - is committed both on the social level and on the purely cinematic one; indeed the characterization is not unique, just as the two planes, the social and the individual, human ones, are not, being closely connected without one impoverishing the other.
Gian Maria Volonté is not an actor; he is a monster. His character rises above the plot and the structure of the film, his despair and mania are sublime. Volonté is partly free from the worker context; he is not an actor who plays a worker, but an actor who plays an actor - it is metatheatrical. ''PRODUCE. CONSUME. DIE'', as CCCP would say, ''A butt. A piece'', as Lulù would say: the analogy between masturbation and production contributes to representing a degenerate society, where human relationships are based on work ties, where - as Marx said speaking of the bourgeoisie - the sacredness of every human relationship has been swept away, replaced by the mere economic relationship. It's a New World which, however, is even less distant from reality than the one imagined by Huxley; it’s the extremization, perhaps, of a real situation, and as with every extreme, it is not so far from reality (I didn’t remember where I had read this sentence, but I must have paraphrased it from here https://www.debaser.it/alexandros-avranas/miss-violence/recensione)
In extremization lies the rejection of the contingent condition, and the rejection has the sound of an assembly line that never stops assembling its pieces, an inhuman noise that enters like a ticking in the brains of its sacrificial victims, driving them to madness. The machine that eats the man, metaphorically in this case, that enslaves him, drives him mad. Madness is here one of the central themes, represented as an almost inevitable consequence of factory work, and it is the punishment for those who do not want to accept it. Those who do not bow to the 'regime' are ultimately marginalized and confined to an asylum, but the poor mad are far from the rich mad; two weights and two measures.
For me, Petri represents in a conceptually dystopian key, without any artificial abstraction, a real microcosm, and manages to convey the alienation of the working class, the base of the capitalist social pyramid. The title is the perfect crowning - or perhaps the top of the pyramid. The weight of the visual language is combined with a strong message, which if expressed in words would not have the same effectiveness: the beauty lies in being able to transform it into something much more than a denunciation, in being able to transform it into a work of art.
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