Elio Petri

"My school was the streets, the communist cells, the cinema, variety entertainment, the municipal library, the struggles of the unemployed, the detention cells, clashes with the police, the studios of artists of my age, the film clubs. And then I also learned from those who at the time were called 'professional revolutionaries'." That's how succinctly and precisely the Italian director, screenwriter, critic and intellectual, Elio Petri (1929 – 1982) described his personal, artistic and political points of reference. His working class background, his love of cinema, and of cinema as a popular art, his politicization and the revolts, the influence of painting as well as the debates with dogmatists of his time lead right to the center of the unique oeuvre of Elio Petri, one of the most important players in 1960s and 70s Italian cinema. Like no other, Petri was able in his acute examinations of post-war Italian society to combine politics and genre, Marx and pop, autobiography and analysis, experiment and narration. He thus created an unsettling cinema that often triggered controversy and whose energy, force and directness remains just as potent today. For a long time, Petri's oeuvre stood in the shadow of his contemporaries, such as Bertolucci, Pasolini or Bellocchio, and did not receive enough attention. It has long been time for rediscovery. On the occasion of the English publication of selected texts by Petri ("Writings on Cinema and Life", Contra Mundum Press, 2013), we present a comprehensive retrospective of his films featuring many guests. In conjunction with the Italian Culture Institute in Berlin.