TODO MODO
Italy, 1976
International title: One Way or Another
Director: Elio Petri. Subject: from the novel of the same name by Leonardo Sciascia. Screenplay: Elio Petri, Berto Pelosso. Director of photography: Luigi Kuveiller. Editing: Ruggero Mastroianni. Scenography: Dante Ferretti. Costumes: Franco Carretti. Music: Ennio Morricone. Interpreters: Gian Maria Volonté (M.), Marcello Mastroianni (don Gaetano), Mariangela Melato (Giacinta), Michel Piccoli (Lui), Ciccio Ingrassia (Voltrano), Franco Citti (driver of M.), Renato Salvatori (commissioner Scalambri) , Cesare Gelli (deputy prefect of Arras), Tino Scotti (cook), Adriano Amidei Migliano (Capra-Porfiri), Giancarlo Badessi (Ventre). Production: Daniele Senatore for Cine Vera. Duration: 130 ‘.
Format: DCP. Origin: Cineteca di Bologna, courtesy of Surf Film. Original version. Subtitles: English.
Restoration carried out by the L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory and promoted by: Cineteca di Bologna and Museo Nazionale del Cinema di Torino, in collaboration with Surf Film.
An invisible film, which represents a precise indictment, sadly prophetic, on the disintegration of the political class, the dissolution of the fundamental values of civil society and the corruption of the Church. As Sciascia himself wrote “Todo modo is a Pasolini film: in the sense that the process that Pasolini wanted to do, and could not do, to the DC ruling class, was done today by Petri. And it is a process that sounds like an execution “.
Elio Petri made a film that resembles, in a formal and structural sense, a kind of profane mystery. The genre involves some distinctive characteristics that are in some way inevitable: seriousness, narrative static, repetition, symbolism, unity of time and place, the rejection of psychology, the proceeding by unrelated blocks. In Petri’s film these characters are all more or less present, as indeed in Salò Sade and in La grande buffata: those who do not like this kind of representation are free to consider them defects. However, we are obliged to say that the fact of having kept the story within the narrow limits of our current political situation ended up giving the film an air of pamphlet, with all that violent, contingent and summary that involves the term. Petri did not care to recover religious sentiment even only to deplore its lack; nor to deepen the theme of corruption, albeit on a satirical level: the only sentiment that animates the film is hatred against the ruling group currently in power in Italy, presented, in a grotesquely apocalyptic air, as a coterie of dead souls in bodies provisionally still alive.
(Alberto Moravia)
Saturday 9 April 2022, h. 7:00 pm
This is a free screening