A bizarre combination of styles with nods to Italian comedy, Petri’s film tried to tell the story of Italy through the workplace. Retracing the facts means reflecting on how much the grotesque fresco imagined by Petri in 1971 is more or less close to our times – post-modern and post-ideological – struggling to recognize the traits of any “working class”, dispersed and hidden behind the countless guises of “flexible” work. If the hell of the piece work factory appears far from today’s zero hours office contracts, the same can not be said about the haunting rhythm of everyday life, then as is today, always alienating.
Claudio Longhi
