in the name of the son

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By MANUFACTURING MARIAROSARIA*

Considerations on the film “Murder of an innocent”, by Mauro Bolognini.

in the novel Petroleum (1992), which he left incomplete and was published posthumously, Pier Paolo Pasolini referred to the beginning of the 1970s in his country as follows: “The Arab East, in reality, seemed to be Italy. It was only the sixteenth or seventeenth of March, but spring was so far along that it felt like full summer. […] In Milan, it is true, the weather was gray, despite the heat […]. But there, the “orient” had other forms: a few days before, a battle had been fought between the extra-parliamentary groups and the police (while the fascists had quietly held their rally, I believe, with Birindelli and Almirante[1]).

The extra-parliamentary groups had organized what would later be considered, in fact, the first “urban guerrilla” clash in Italy: everything that had preceded it was haphazard and amateurish. The youth of lotta continues[2], technically, they were armed and organized almost like a small army, etc. Milan still bore the marks of that confrontation; and the smoke from incendiary bombs and tear gas still seemed not to have dissipated.[3] Then came the news of Feltrinelli's death: the image of the transmission tower, at the foot of which Feltrinelli died, devoured every other real image that the course of life soon began to offer as a consolatory alternative [...]. And then came the timely communiqué, signed by a group of intellectuals, with the declaration that he had been assassinated by the fascists – or rather, probably by a non-Italian organization, that is, the CIA – to create a climate favorable to the right in the elections. imminent.[4] […] It was the death of Feltrinelli, therefore, that gave Italy an oriental, almost Palestinian air, in facts, in things, in bodies, in aspects of life, in the air.[5]; but at the same time he cast a light of maddening novelty upon her.”

The socio-political framework described by the Pasolinian narrator is the background of Italian films shot in that period, among which Imputation of the omicide of a student (Murder of an innocent), by Mauro Bolognini, and Slam the monster on the front page (The monster on the front page), by Marco Bellocchio, both from 1972. As I already analyzed Bellocchio's work in the article “Those few minutes in which history entered fiction” (published on the website the earth is round on November 30, 2021), in this text I will focus on the film by the Tuscan director.

Murder of an innocent can be considered an anomalous work in Bolognini's filmography. Until then, the filmmaker had distinguished himself for directing mostly comedies – whether at the beginning of his career or in the 1960s, when Italian cinema, in order to survive, had embarked on the vein of episodic films – and also for having dedicated himself to the transposition of literary works to the screen, mainly through his collaboration with a young screenwriter, Pier Paolo Pasolini. In addition to being anomalous, Murder of an innocent it also didn't fit well into pre-established genres. Was a policeman or was it part of political engagement cinema?

O policeman, that is, the Italian version of the detective film, “officially” appeared in 1972 with The polizia ringrazia (The police thank you), by Stefano Vanzina, but its prototype can be considered The polizia incriminates the legge solves (The police incriminate… the law absolves, 1973), by Enzo G. Castellari.[6] Although more aligned with conservative ideals, the police Italian has not ceased to be characterized by a strong political charge, by the constant contestation of the establishment. In fact, this genre that stood out in the 1970s and 1980s, if, on the one hand, as Davide Pulici states, it was the result of “a massive work of transferring and adapting the arsenal western to current urban contexts”, on the other hand, according to FT, it fed on “action films that came from the other side of the ocean, like The French connection (Operation France, 1971), by William Friedkin, or Dirty Harry (relentless pursuer, 1971), by Don Siegel” and the engaged nature of productions such as Confession to a police commissioner to the Procurator of the Republic (Confessions of a Police Commissioner to the Public Prosecutor, 1971), by Damiano Damiani, and Investigation of a citizen above suspicion (Investigation on a citizen above reproach, 1969), by Elio Petri.

If Castellari's achievement represented the prototype of policeman, that of Petri can be considered the zero point of Italian political cinema, being a film that “responded to the need for displacement to the left of the Italian middle bourgeoisie”, in the opinion of Gian Piero Brunetta. The two genres mirrored the aspirations of that society in the transition from the 1960s to the following decade, but took different paths, since, while the first accentuated “its character of action and representation of violence, becoming a reactionary genre par excellence”, the second, “albeit for a brief time, it seemed to have all the credentials of a progressive and democratic vision”, always in the words of Brunetta.

According to Angela Prudenzi and Elisa Resegotti, organizers of Italian political cinema – 60s and 70s (2006), this genre was composed of directors who “observed Italian reality from an extremely ethical point of view”, that is, “authors who, moved by a deep desire for justice – in most cases derived from personal political engagement and / or collective –, with their works, they profoundly marked the intellectual panorama of Italy and, at the same time, produced a great impact on international culture”. A rather vague definition, as it could be applied to a good part of Italian production from Neorealism onwards, as well as the list of filmmakers listed by them is imprecise – Mario Monicelli, Dino Risi, Carlo Lizzani, Damiano Damiani, Francesco Rosi, Vittorio De Seta , Elio Petri, [Paolo] and Vittorio Taviani, Giuliano Montaldo, Francesco Maselli, Ettore Scola, Marco Bellocchio, Bernardo Bertolucci and Roberto Faenza –, as many of them could also fit into other strands, such as Neorealism (although in its death throes ), Italian-style comedy, the new wave of Italian cinema or the policeman. And, in fact, the authors included films produced between 1960 and 1979, extending the spectrum of political cinema by almost a decade.

Mauro Bolognini is not part of this list, but the authors, in addition to the fourteen deponent directors, also interviewed Ugo Pirro, screenwriter of many of the films of engaged cinema, among which those of Elio Petri, his most important partnership in the years between the decade of the 1960s and 1970s. [7] And Ugo Pirro, along with Ugo Liberatore, scripted the 1972 film by the Tuscan filmmaker. Although disregarded as engaged work, Murder of an innocent comprises Il vero poliziottesco, by Tania Di Massimantonio (2015), as an exponent of those achievements that contested the “great judicial family”[8], represented by both magistrates and police officers, in the execution of a “distant, torn, diverted or postponed” justice.

And indeed, over time, the inclusion of Murder of an innocent in the vein of political cinema has been imposing itself, also driven by its reception in France, where it was released late: on DVD, in 2009, and, in theaters, in 2015. Although some critics – like many, in the heat of the moment – ​​still cheer the nose for this realization by Bolognini, over the years, the film gained new readings linked mainly to its plot, whose background, the constant clashes that characterized the troubled years of lead in Italy, was scrutinized by Pirro and Liberatore with a gaze laden with political and sociological intentions.

During a violent clash between police and architecture students from the University of Rome who support a demonstration for affordable housing in Borgata Focene (a suburb of the Italian capital), each side suffers a casualty. The investigation, however, is dedicated only to discovering who killed the law enforcement officer and the accusation falls on Massimo Trotti, when, in fact, the culprit is Fabio Sola, son of the judge who will be in charge of the case. The young man, without his parents knowing about it, joins an extreme left-wing group, and, in the name of these ideals, even passes on to his companions information copied, in the dead of night, from the dossier on the case, which his father had taken home to continue examining the case file.

Despite an entire career dedicated to serving the system, Aldo Sola begins to question more and more the desire of the police and the Public Prosecutor to discover a culprit at any cost, while his conscience asks him to investigate not one, but two deaths. . So he decides to take an interest in the ideals of young people and is willing to try to understand his son's gesture, when Fabio, after having admitted his guilt and having brought him the brass knuckles with which he had hit the policeman, declares his intention to not to present himself to justice until the culprit for the student's death has not been found: “why should I turn myself in while another murderer is out there protected by all of you? You need the police to keep supplying you with culprits to convict. I want to see what you're going to do now that you know the truth. The day I find out that you or someone else has arrested the agent who killed my partner, I'll turn myself in, only then. The dead are two and two must be the murderers.”

Touched by the boy's words and attitude, the judge throws the only evidence that could incriminate him into the Tiber river, since dialogue seems to him the best way, not only to reconnect with his beloved son, but also to resolve the explosive situation. the country is living. In fact, he had resigned from his position with these words: “I never want to judge anyone again. From now on, I want to start understanding. I want to understand why so many young people are against us. Behind the ideas that we reject, there are our children, their certainties, their hesitations, their crimes many times. I want to find an explanation for each of these crimes, not a sentence. I want to join your troubles. I do not want to be alone".

Although Murder of an innocent Although it is a work of fiction, its opening sequence is striking, in its almost documentary reconstruction of the clash between police and demonstrators, in which archival material (in black and white) alternates with filmed scenes (in color). The protesters scream Slogans as "Lotta lasts, only slow” [Fight with rigor, without fear], they raise their closed fists, carry sticks and posters that preach the occupation of houses, schools, factories, neighborhoods, the city. During the confrontation, a student is fatally shot, many are arrested and when a companion, also attacked by the police, finds brass knuckles on the ground, with which he accidentally kills a policeman. It is a long chain of violent images, lasting more than two and a half minutes, almost without music (which begins to insinuate itself from the unfortunate reaction of the second student), which serves as a narrative trigger, as it is from him the plot itself begins to unravel[9].

The sequence, which abruptly introduces the viewer into the atmosphere of that time, was perhaps unnecessary at the time; but these images, when seen or reviewed later, manage to convey the extent to which social tension in Italy had reached. The film was shot in late 1971[10], the year that marks the transition from the student protest phase, which began in 1967, to the period of political violence, which intensifies until 1977, reaching its peak on March 16, 1978 with the kidnapping of the Christian Democrat leader Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades. That's when it becomes clear that the country is heading towards a progressive authoritarian shift, the so-called "tension strategy", in which the national scenario is manipulated by power, through terrorist acts that terrified the population, to maintain the status quo. status quo and to contain the advance of the Italian Communist Party in the elections and the conquests of the social struggles of 1968-1969. Its chronological landmarks are December 12, 1969 (a bomb exploded at the National Bank of Agriculture, in Piazza Fontana in Milan, with a balance of seventeen dead and eighty-eight wounded) and August 2, 1980 (bomb attack in the lobby from Bologna railway station, in which eighty-five people died and more than two hundred were injured).

Although the film does not directly name any political group and where the students are, there are references to various currents – on the walls, next to the hammer and sickle symbol, there are writings referring to potere operaio (Worker power)[11], Continuous Struggle, The poster (The Manifest)[12], posters such as Accidental death of an anarchist (Accidental death of an anarchist)[13] and portraits of Ernesto Che Guevara, Mao Tse-tung and Karl Marx –, the Slogans shouted during the demonstration leave no doubt that it is an arm of Continuous Fight.

The clash between law enforcement and protesters and the subsequent clash between police and students – after the attack by a group of fascists on the Faculty of Architecture to stop the disclosure of data from the case files published by the newspaper The cause of the popolo [The cause of the people]—call to mind a similar fact. It is the mythical battle of Valle Giulia, fought at the foot of the hill that houses the Faculty of Architecture, on March 1, 1968, which, according to an article by Giampaolo Bultrini and Mario Scialoja, with its “two and a half hours of rage and of blood”, miraculously with no deaths despite dozens of wounded, became one of the symbols of the student revolt.

This did not prevent dissonant voices, even on the left, such as Pasolini who saw, in the young people's contestation, “nothing more than the latest, planned 'fashion' of bourgeois children, completely devoid of any real intention of subverting the constituted order. ”, in the words of Gianpaolo Fissore. In the poem dedicated to the event, “Il PCI ai giovani!! (Appunti in versi per una poetry in prose followed by an 'Apology')”, without taking into account that the university students of the 1960s were no longer just children of the bourgeoisie, since many of them came from the middle class or popular classes, Pasolini took the side of the police, as representatives of the proletariat:

“When, yesterday, in Valle Giulia, you exchanged blows with the police,

I sympathized with the cops!

Because police officers are children of the poor.

They come from the outskirts, rural or urban, whatever. […]

They are twenty years old, your age, my dears and my faces. […]

the young police

that you by venerable vandalism (of high insurrectionary tradition)

of daddy's children, they spanked,

belong to another social class.

In Valle Giulia, yesterday, there was a sample

of class struggle: and you, friends (although on the side

of reason) were the rich,

while the police (who were on the side

wrong) were the poor. Nice win then

yours! […]

Drunk on victory over the boys

of the police forced by poverty into servitude, […]

leave aside the only truly dangerous instrument

in the fight against their fathers:

i.e. communism. […]

If you want power, at least seize power

of a Party that is still in opposition [...]

and whose theoretical objective is the destruction of Power”. [14]

For his controversial attack on the student movement, the author was branded a reactionary, despite not defending the system in any part of the work.[15]. In Fissore's opinion: “The definitive condemnation of the bourgeoisie thus coincided, paradoxically, with the definitive condemnation of the forces antagonistic to it: in fact, denying the identity of one corresponded to denying the identity (and the historical role) of the others”.

While Pasolini would have denied an identity to the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, in Fissore's reading, albeit in reverse order, Bolognini does the same in the sequence of the morgue, when he places the corpses of the student and the policeman side by side, practically devoid of evidence that could identify them as belonging to one group (the one who rebelled against the bourgeois order) or another (the one who repressed in its name), as if wanting to show that both are victims of state violence, which condemned them to die so young. And, if one of the delegates rages against the students, calling them cowards and drug addicts, the judge reprimands him saying: “For you, not even death made those two equal”. An equality that erased social differences and that, even for a moment, rescued the two victims from their anonymity, giving them back an identity not of class, but of human beings.

Bringing a fictional event (the pitched battle in the opening sequence) in the same proportion as a real event (that of Valle Giulia) into a familiar microcosm is a narrative strategy that aims to involve each spectator individually in a drama whose deeper social repercussions, they often escaped the understanding of the common people, who were only frightened by the violence of those years. And the generational differences between father and son, transformed into an ideological clash, are also a strategy to make more concrete the criticism of the judicial system aligned with power.

Furthermore, without this passage from the general to the particular, it would not have been possible to understand the change in the father's behavior, since this behavior is not generalized, rather representing an auspice of better days; however, later historical events will smother that tenuous hope, as the height of violence in Italy was yet to come. Because – the film seems to say, by taking the side of the young people –, while Fabio remains firm in his convictions, whether right or wrong, it will be up to the judge, representative of his parents' generation, to free himself from his chains and give the first step on this long path that could lead to the opening of dialogue with the child and to family and social reconciliation.

And young Sola will embark on this path of renewing family and social relationships, because, if he had already disentangled himself from the blackmail of affective ties, exerted mainly by his mother's overflowing love, by admitting his guilt to his father, which entails the release of the another student, begins to withdraw from the blackmail of ideological ties, exercised by the group, who prefers the sacrifice of an innocent victim to the confession of the true culprit, which could be trumpeted in the headlines of the bourgeois press, as this served the cause.

In a book titled 1500 films to avoid: dalla A alla Z, the entertaining stroncature “al vetriolo” by a controversial critic, [1500 films to avoid: from A to Z, the amusing corrosive reviews of a countercurrent critic], Massimo Bertarelli, when listing Murder of an innocent, writes: “Mauro Bolognini constructs a sociopolitical drama that leans (to the left) more than the Tower of Pisa, according to the iron rule, not just cinematographic, of the 1970s. right. Always and whatever. And who is neither one nor the other? Well, he's also bad until he manages to demonstrate that he's on the left”.

In this way, the film is also involved in the clash between progressive forces and reactionary forces, because if Bertarelli makes it lean to the left, other authors do not share the same opinion, emphasizing that the director is not in his field and underlining commercial intentions. of the work. For Heiko H. Caimi: “the attempt to narrate the restlessness of a time is trampled by familiar events, and does not manage to be as sharp as other films of the time, losing along the way the anarchic vein that Pirro managed to create together with Petri. Cops are really hateful, but we're leagues away from Investigation about um citizen above de Qualquer suspicious, and the period picture is faced by Bolognini with his usual rhetorical schematism”.

Another anonymous critic follows the same line, stating, on a website about the film: “critical reflection on the value of justice (an operation chosen, in those years, by many authors: just think of Elio Petri and Giuliano Montaldo) seems forced. pretentious and the film ends up collapsing in on itself, resulting in approximate and amorphous”.

In an instigating analysis, prior to the realization of Murder of an innocent quality The monster on the front page, Goffredo Bettini and Elena Miele already warned of the pitfalls that the film industry could represent for works with a political content: “Films that apparently propose interesting content, seeking to enter the sphere of so-called engaged cinema – which, in fact, through choices traditional or not at all ingenious and which, above all, surrender to commercial cinema –, participate fully in the productive and ideological game of power, placing themselves, moreover, as a false alternative to spectacular and declaredly bourgeois cinema, thus mystifying facts and men, who belong to the revolutionary culture and ideology”.

If, on the one hand, this is true, especially if we think that, in that period, there was a whole militant cinema, committed to modifying relations with the public – a public, in general, already in tune with the ideas proposed by him –, on the other hand, on the other, how to make the problems of that time reach the great masses of people? Does Murder of an innocent ou The monster on the front page – which, despite denouncing press-power collusion, was also execrated by the left and the extreme left [15] – and the other films of the Italian film industry, said to be engaged, did not make their spectators reflect?

As Udo Rotenberg pointed out: “it is false [to say] that the film does not assume a clear attitude, just because it refrains from political statements. On the contrary, he was just trying to evade the usual ideological suspicions, but he made no secret of his stance that society needs to change.”

I do not have a definitive answer to the question I asked above, but I began to ask myself the question in light of the reception that this 1972 production by Bolognini had in several countries, in more recent years, when it came to be considered a work of character. political, as it allowed recovering the climate of general contestation of the focused period.

*Mariarosaria Fabris is a retired professor at the Department of Modern Letters at FFLCH-USP. Author, among other books, of Italian cinematographic neo-realism: a reading (Edusp).

Revised version of article published in Annals of the IX National Seminar of the Memory Center – UNICAMP and I Cultural Heritage Colloquium, 2019.

References

BERTARELLI, Massimo. 1500 films to avoid: dalla A alla Z, the entertaining stroncature “al vetriolo” by a controversial critic. Rome: Gremese Editore, 2003.

BETTINI, Goffredo; MIELE, Elena. “Cinema come apologia della class al potere”. Cinema New, Florence, 206th year, n. 1970, Jul.-Aug. 278, p. 281-XNUMX.

BRUNETTA, Gian Piero. Story of the Italian cinema from 1945 agli anni ottanta. Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1982.

BULTRINI, Giampaolo; SCIALOJA, Mario. “La battaglia di Valle Giulia”. L'Espresso, Rome, 10 March. 1968.

CAIMI, Heiko H.Imputation of the omicide of a student regia by Mauro Bolognini”. Available in .

FABRIS, Mariarosaria, “Through the lens of ideology”. In: CATANI, Afrânio M. et al. (org.). Annals of full texts of the XIX Socine Meeting. São Paulo: Socine, 2015, p. 219-224.

“Polyziottesque film”. Available in .

FISSORE, Gianpaolo. “Al cinema nel Sessantotto”. Historically, Bologna, v. 5, no. 13.

  1. T. “The Italian poliziesco” (2001). Available in .

“Imputazione di omicidio per uno studente”. Available in .

MASSIMANTONIO, Tania Di. Il vero poliziottesco. Youcanprint, 2015. Available at .

PASOLINI, Pier Paolo. “Il PCI ai giovani!! (Appunti in versi per una poetry in prosa following an 'Apologia')”. In: Heretical empiricism. Milano, Garzanti, 1972, p. 155-163.

PASOLINI, Pier Paolo. Petroleum. Turin: Einaudi, 1992.

PICCININI, Alberto. "The side teddy boy of PPP”. In: PASOLINI, Pier Paolo. the nebula. Trans. Manuela Gomes. Lisbon: Antigone, 2016, p. 7-19.

PRUDENZI, Angela; RESEGOTTI, Elisa (org.). Italian political cinema – 60s and 70s. São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2006.

PULICI, Davide. “Il poliziesco all'italiana” (21 Feb. 2017). Available in . Access: 20 Oct. 2017.

ROTENBERG, Udo. “Imputazione di omicidio per uno studente (Mordanklage gegen einen Studenten) 1972 Mauro Bolognini”, 4 set. 2010. Available at .

WIAZEMSKY, Anne. One year later. Trans. Julia da Rosa Simoes. São Paulo: However, 2018.

Notes

[1] Giorgio Almirante was secretary and one of the founders of Italian Social Movement (Italian Social Movement - MSI), right-wing party heir to fascist ideals. In the 1972 elections, the MSI merged with the Italian Democratic Party of Unità Monarchica (Italian Democratic Party of Monarchist Unity), giving rise to the MSI-Destra Nazionale (MSI-National Right – MSI-DN). The new coalition managed to elect 56 deputies (8,7% of the votes) and 26 senators (9,2% of the votes), later approaching the far-right extra-parliamentary groups National Avanguardia (National Vanguard) and New Order (New order). One of the elected deputies was Admiral Gino Birindelli, who later became president of the MSI-DN.

[2] Formed by revolutionary groups of the extra-parliamentary left, lotta continues (Luta Contínua) emerged in the second half of 1969, from the split of the Operative-student movement (Workers-Students Movement) of Turin, which, in the first half of that year, had articulated the struggles at the university and at FIAT.

[3] Reference to the serious riots that shook the city on March 11, 1972, when law enforcement and extremist militants clashed in a pitched battle.

[4] On March 15, 1972, the body of Giangiacomo Feltrinelli was found in ruins at the foot of a high voltage tower in the outskirts of Milan. The death of the ex-partisan and founder of the Feltrinelli publishing house was caused by the explosion of a trotile load, the night before. Feltrinelli had been expelled from Italian Communist Party (Italian Communist Party – PCI) for having launched, in 1957, the first world edition of the novel Doctor Zhivago, by Boris Pasternak, whose publication had been banned in the Soviet Union. In the 1960s, while traveling in Latin America, he had come into contact with Régis Debray and, earlier, with Fidel Castro, who had entrusted him with Che's Diary in Bolivia, which Feltrinelli will publish, as well as the photo of the guerrilla fighter taken by Alberto Korda, which will become iconic. After going underground in 1970, he had founded one of the first left-wing armed groups in Italy, the Gruppo d'Azione Partigiana (Partisan Action Group - GAP), to face a probable fascist coup. Although left-wing and far-left exponents have defended the hypothesis of murder, the thesis that his death happened during an act of sabotage, with which he intended to cause a blackout in the city to harm the PCI congress, ended up prevailing, version confirmed seven years later by members of Brigades Redheads (Red Brigades – BR). In Petroleum, the character Carlo opined that the editor “had killed himself by playing the guerrilla; that if he had been poor, or just any petty bourgeois, he would have ended up in a clinic, or even a madhouse, a few years ago, and that he was definitely a madman who met the end of an idiot; there was no contempt, in this interpretation of him, there was indeed a certain compassion – but certainly no pity”.

[5] In the 1970s, the PLO - Palestine Liberation Organization (created in 1964 with the aim of fighting for the independence of its territory) intensified armed resistance against Israel with guerrilla actions that also reached civilian targets.

[6] The roots of the genre would be in Svegliati and uccidi (Lutring wakes up and kills, 1966) e Bandits in Milan (Bandits of Milan, 1968), both by Carlo Lizzani and having the capital of Lombardy as a backdrop (cf. Wikipedia entry on “Film poliziottesco”). in the introduction of the nebula, Portuguese translation of La nebbiosa (1959), Alberto Piccinini puts forward a hypothesis about Milan Black [Black Milan], by Gian Rocco and Pino Serpa, extracted (with various modifications) from the above mentioned script by Pasolini. According to Piccinini, this 1963 production, by the title, “anticipates the 'poliziotteschi' of the 70's”. The interpretation, however, does not hold when watching the film, even if in one of the posters, one of the protagonists is portrayed, in the foreground, wielding a revolver. In this case, the adjective "black” (“preto”) refers to the phrase “chronicle Black” (“police chronicle”), because it focuses on a night out with a bunch of young troublemakers, whose behavior slips into criminality, rather than referring properly to the police genre.

[7] After the resounding international success of Investigation on a citizen above reproach, the duo Petri-Pirro scored another great success, The working class goes to heaven (The working class goes to paradise.

[8] Such as the aforementioned Confessions of a Police Commissioner to the Public Prosecutor; Process per direttissima (1974), by Lucio De Caro; Corruption at the Palazzo di Giustizia (Corruption in the Palace of Justice, 1975), by Marcello Aliprandi; The police have their hands tied (1975), by Luciano Ercoli.

[9] The same impact is caused by the opening minutes of Bellocchio's production, in which documentary scenes filmed by his team (a rally at which an MSI exponent spoke; a street in Milan covered with the banners of parties contesting the elections; Feltrinelli's funeral ) are interspersed with archival material about the fateful March 11th, before introducing the plot itself.

[10] Its launch was on February 4, 1972.

[[1]1] Poder Operário was an extreme left-wing movement, active between 1968 and 1973. Its most famous representatives were university professor Antonio Negri and writer Nanni Balestrini.

[12] Expelled from the PCI, at the end of 1969, for criticizing the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Soviet Union, the members of O Manifesto later organized themselves into a political party, participating in the 1972 elections.

[13] Performed for the first time on December 5, 1970, Dario Fo's comedy recorded the “involuntary” fall of Giuseppe Pinelli from a window at Milan police headquarters, on the night of December 15, 1969. Along with Pietro Valpreda, another anarchist, Pinelli had been accused of the attack on Praça Fontana, although the crime had been perpetrated by reactionary forces.

[14] The poem was originally published in n. 10 of the literary magazine New arguments (Apr.-June 1968). Although the work has been translated into our language – “IPC for young people! (Notes in verse for a prose poem, followed by an 'Apologia')” – and published in the Portuguese edition of heretical empiricism (Lisboa: Assírio e Alvim, 1982, p. 122-129), I translated it again because I did not agree with Miguel Serras Pereira's version.

[15] Em One year later (One year later, 2015), Anne Wiazemsky records the opinion of Jean-Luc Godard: “For him, Pasolini had become a traitor after he took sides in favor of the Italian policemen, 'sons of the proletariat', against the students, 'wealthy sons of the bourgeoisie '. At the same time, however, he continued to admire him”. The actress was the interpreter of Theorem (Theorem, 1968) e pork (Pigsty, 1969), works in which, as in “La sequenza del fiore di carta” (“The sequence of the paper flower”), which is part of the feature film love and rabbia (love and anger, 1968), the filmmaker also took a stand against the idea of ​​a youth revolution.

[16] One of the strongest criticisms of these achievements concerns the characterization of the militants. In Murder of an innocent, although young people are not demonized, even when the arrest of one of them is the tactic to accuse the State, the representation was considered vague. We must not forget that, except for one or another production outside the framework of industrial cinema, most films, such as Bolognini's, were made by teams whose members belonged to one or two generations prior to that of the fictional characters, that is to say to people who did not have a direct experience of those events. This type of criticism also affected The monster on the front page, whose far-left militants were considered folklore and not very credible, despite the fact that Bellocchio had joined a Maoist organization. In short, for militant critics, political cinema as practiced by the film industry did not exist. This issue was addressed further by me in “Through the Lens of Ideology”.

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