


This essay contributes to the analysis of a phenomenon that became diffused between the 1990s and the 2000s: the mind-game lm. It focuses on the destabilization of the classic story in the light of new digital technologies, providing original strategies of production and new possibilities of fruition. There are several studies of the different typologies of mind-game lms, of the nature of narrative developments introduced by various directors, and of the technical aspects relating to the psychological dynamics in the image-narrator- spectator relationship. However, there are fewer studies of the modernist roots of this phenomenon. Elsaesser locates the mind-game lm within the same category of European subjective cinema during the 1960s. In other words, it constitutes a meta-cinematographic phenomenon, whose origins lie in the European vanguard modalities of experimentation. Following Elsaesser’s theories, I suggest that it is possible to study the parallelisms and elements of disruption between that subjective cinema and these new forms of experimentation, which appear to conciliate commercial needs and authorial perspectives. In particular, I seek to reveal the traces of this relationship in the cinema of Elio Petri, using Lev Manovich’s category of the ‘narrative database’.



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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
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Cinéma & Cie
Angela Bianca Saponari
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The Modernist Roots of the Mind-Game Film: The Example of an Italian Puzzle
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The Modernist Roots of the Mind-Game Film:
The Example of an Italian Puzzle
Angela Bianca Saponari, Università degli Studi di Bari ‘Aldo Moro’




Abstract

    This essay contributes to the analysis of a phenomenon that became diffused
    between the 1990s and the 2000s: the mind-game film. It focuses on the
    destabilization of the classic story in the light of new digital technologies,
    providing original strategies of production and new possibilities of fruition.
    There are several studies of the different typologies of mind-game films, of the
    nature of narrative developments introduced by various directors, and of the
    technical aspects relating to the psychological dynamics in the image-narrator-
    spectator relationship. However, there are fewer studies of the modernist roots of
    this phenomenon. Elsaesser locates the mind-game film within the same category
    of European subjective cinema during the 1960s. In other words, it constitutes a
    meta-cinematographic phenomenon, whose origins lie in the European vanguard
    modalities of experimentation. Following Elsaesser’s theories, I suggest that it
    is possible to study the parallelisms and elements of disruption between that
    subjective cinema and these new forms of experimentation, which appear to
    conciliate commercial needs and authorial perspectives. In particular, I seek
    to reveal the traces of this relationship in the cinema of Elio Petri, using Lev
    Manovich’s category of the ‘narrative database’.



Mind-Game Film: A Theoretical Framework

   A new film typology captured the attention of both the public and critics
between the mid-1990s and the early 2000s, within a Hollywood system that
was actively seeking to innovate, and find stories that would meet the needs of
a modern, changed audience. In this period, the majors appeared increasingly
favourable towards narrative experimentation, having perceived a growing
audience that was interested in non-conventional approaches to narration. In
order to capture this new interest, the industry took influence from television,
science fiction, comics and videogames.1

1
 See David Bordwell, The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies (Berkeley, Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 2006), p. 74.

                                                    Cinéma & Cie, vol. XVII, no. 28, Spring 2017
                                     Angela Bianca Saponari


   At the same time, several auteurs sought to establish a coherent visual language
that matched this moment, and specifically the innovative digital technologies
that were emergent.
   This tendency led to the production of what Thomas Elsaesser labels ‘mind-
game films’.2 With this definition, he refers to a heterogeneous group of
movies characterized by a similar tendency to carry the characters of the story
(and the spectators too) through the twists and turns of complex, enigmatic,
and labyrinthine narrations. In view of their radical approaches to narrative,
these movies cannot be included within the traditional artistic, production and
genre categories, instead belonging to a sort of ‘border zone’, where auteur,
independent and mainstream cinema converge.
   In most instances, the specificity of the mind-game film consists of a precise
distinction between this kind of movie and traditional cinematographic
storytelling, especially as many of the films demonstrate complex and unstructured
narrative. This approach was influenced by two factors: on the one hand, auteur
cinema of the 1960s, whose experimental tendency was reinterpreted and made
systematic in mind-game films; on the other, the social and cultural context in
which the mind-game films developed, between the 1990s and the 2000s.
   Referring to the category of narrative database introduced by Lev Manovich, Allan
Cameron discusses modular narratives when categorizing the typical plot complexity
of puzzle movies.3 Indeed, their main features include the tendency to dismantle
narratives into separate segments that are presented in complex combinations
which, according to Cameron’s analysis — and, as will be illustrated later, as per
Marsha Kinder’s trans-formalist theories — recall ‘the cinematic experimentation
of European art cinema’.4 From this perspective, ‘modular narrative goes beyond
the classical deployment of flashback, offering a series of disarticulated narrative
pieces, often arranged in radically non-chronological ways via flash-forwards, overt
repetition or a destabilization of the relationship between present and past’.5


2
  See Thomas Elsaesser, ‘The Mind-Game Film’, in Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in
Contemporary Cinema, ed. by Warren Buckland (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008), pp. 13–41. See
also the definition of the ‘psychological puzzle film’ by Elliot Panek in ‘The Poet and the Detective:
Defining the Psychological Puzzle Film’, Film Criticism, 31.1-2 (2006), 62–88.
3
  Among the features of mind-game movies is the introduction of the ‘puzzle plot’, that is, a plot
in which ‘the arrangement of events is not just complex, but complicated and perplexing; the
events are not simply interwoven, but entangled’. Warren Buckland, ‘Introduction: Puzzle Plots’,
in Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema, ed. by Warren Buckland (Oxford:
Wiley-Blackwell, 2008), pp. 1–12 (p. 3) [emphasis in the original].
4
   See Allan Cameron, Modular Narratives in Contemporary Cinema (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2008), p. 1 and following. Marsha Kinder has developed an interesting stylistic legacy
and narrative analysis of Luis Buñuel’s films and their relationship with contemporary cinema.
See Marsha Kinder, ‘Hot Spots, Avatars, and Narrative Fields Forever: Buñuel’s Legacy for New
Digital Media and Interactive Database Narrative’, Film Quarterly, 55.4 (2002), 2–15. See also
Marsha Kinder, ‘Narrative Equivocations between Movies and Games’, in The New Media Book,
ed. by Dan Harries (London: BFI, 2002), pp. 119–32 (p. 119). On the theorization of database
narrative, see Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000).
5
  Cameron, p. 1.

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                          The Modernist Roots of the Mind-Game Film


A Perspective of Analysis: Paradigmatic Roots of ‘Mind Cinema’

   Two main features emerge in mind-game films, which are deeply interconnected.
The first is the tendency to situate the film in the ‘border zone’ that divides
auteur and commercial cinema. The second is complex and unstructured forms
of narration, whose purpose is to carry the spectators through the twists and
turns of labyrinthine and complex stories.6
   The first feature is perhaps the most interesting, as well as the least studied
by scholars. In other words, it is important to trace the paradigmatic roots of
the mind-game film, here considered not as a separate entity but rather as a
phenomenon linked to the evolution of a shared practice of cinema that crosses
different areas (genre, auteur, etc.) and seeks to awaken spectators from the
torpidity of the conventional movie. I would like to propose the mind-game film
as the most recent landing place of the aesthetic modality called ‘mind-cinema’.
   Elsaesser and Hagener frame mind-game films in the meta-cinematographic
typology of the mental image, where the mind, cinema and conscience converge.
As a consequence the spectator becomes aware of the very act of watching, and
of the processes of their own conscience. This occurs similarly in several films
released during the 1960s — from Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt (Le Mépris,
1963) to Federico Fellini’s 8½ (Otto e mezzo, 1963) — where ‘a given scene
suggests there may be an additional level of reflexivity, and this can be deducted
not from the presence of mirrors or mise-en-abîme because they are pure cerebral
activity, a “virtuality” in a Deleuzian sense’.7
   Alain Resnais’s and Godard’s formal experiments represent the most eminent
instances of cinéma désordonné. The majority of their films address a completely
different kind of spectator. However, while Resnais and Godard counted on
culturally-aware spectators — ‘for whom experimentation was almost a norm,
or at least something expected’8 — instances of non-linear narrative in recent
American cinema seek ultimately to shock a mass public, leading it outside of
the conventional and reassuring logic of Hollywood narration. This way, formal
experimentation that was once restricted to a small, elite audience ‘has moved
out into the more volatile region of popular culture’.9
   Matthew Campora’s reflections may be useful to understand this phenomenon.
Campora states that the merging of auteur cinema and commercial necessities
is nothing new; even in the 1930s and 1940s, when German directors came
to Hollywood, they ended up incorporating elements from the expressionist


6
  A clear example is David Fincher’s cinema, quite familiar with that ‘grey zone’ between commercial
and artistic and which may represent the most suitable environment for the mind-game film at the
beginning of the millennium.
7
  See Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener, Film Theory: An Introduction Through the Senses (New
York, London: Routledge, 2010), pp. 168–76.
8
  See David Denby, ‘The New Disorder: Adventures in Film Narrative’, New Yorker, 5 March 2007,
<http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/03/05/the-new-disorder> [accessed 17 June 2017].
9
  Ibidem.

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                                      Angela Bianca Saponari


aesthetic into studio productions. Moreover, in the 1960s and in the 1970s,
several young Hollywood directors adopted and adapted the expressive
experimentations of various international new waves. However, the innovation
of such appropriations in more recent years lies in the fact that manifold narrative
structures are found in films that are unusually challenging for a mass audience.
This element shows how in cinema, as in other mass culture media, the line
between experimental aesthetic and commercial genres has become increasingly
blurred.10 Campora’s analysis starts with the study of Michel Gondry’s Eternal
Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004). Using Janet Murray’s definition, Campora
situates the film within the multiform narratives model. Multiform narrative
cinema is generally characterized by the presence of different diegetic levels.
This multiplicity not only affects the structural part of the plot, but also its
ontological side. In other words, in this cinema not only do the plotlines of
several characters cross and different spatial-temporal levels alternate, but it
also offers a story which develops while crossing alternative and parallel realities.
This narrative model, explored in genres like science-fiction, horror and fantasy,
recurs quite frequently in auteur cinema, where it is utilized to represent the
inner world of a character, and is often opposed to their phenomenal reality.
Some examples are: Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (Das Cabinet des
Dr. Caligari, 1920), Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries (Smultronstället, 1959)
and Federico Fellini’s 8½.
   In many mind-game films, as in European auteur cinema, there are different
levels to the stories and the meta-diegetic dimension is accentuated: secondary
narrations proliferate.11 Here any narrative in the narrative must be reconnected
to the meta-diegetic level, which can be characterized by different strategies that
transcend significantly the mere representation of characters’ memories, dreams
or hallucinations.12
   The idea is to overcome the contraposition between modernist and
postmodernist paradigm; in light of the reflections made here, it is evidently
possible to identify similar processes to those of the mind-game film in other
filmographies of the past.




10
   Matthew Campora, ‘Art Cinema and New Hollywood: Multiform Narrative and Sonic Metalepsis
in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’, New Review of Film and Television Studies, 7.2 (2009),
119–31 (p. 122).
11
   The reference here is to Genette’s distinctions of the three levels of story — extra-diegetic, intra-
diegetic, and meta-diegetic. The centre of the extra-diegetic level is a narration determined by the
combination of mise en scène and elements of cinematic grammar; central to the intra-diegetic level
is the primary narration of the movie; and the meta-diegetic level refers to the secondary narration
generated at the intra-diegetic level. Gérard Genette, Figures III. Discours du récit. Essai méthode
(Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1972).
12
   Campora, p. 124.

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                          The Modernist Roots of the Mind-Game Film


An Interpretative Model: The Modernist Experimentation of the Narrative Database

   As stated previously, the roots of the image-mind relationship are connected
to auteur film, and can also be observed in European experimentation and
vanguard movements. In the same way, several films characterized by a complex
narrative structure and playful/disturbing dynamics in their relationship with
the spectator — produced in countries with deep political and social crises or
historical moments defined by the push for change — can be considered as
similar ancestors of mind-game films.
   Many earlier films reveal how the need to go beyond a mimetic relationship with
objective reality has been central in every historical period and not necessarily
linked to digital technologies. The aim of these experiments has always been to
reflect on the nature of conscience, our approach to the world and the exploration
of individual perceptive conditions. Let us turn to one such example.
   Marsha Kinder sought to identify several tendencies of contemporary narration
in the experiments of the original and complex director that is Luis Buñuel.
Kinder outlines her intention as follows: ‘I want to propose a new context —
the convergence between cinema and new digital media — to explore Buñuel’s
legacy for conceptualizing interactive database narratives and their discreet
pleasure.’13 She argues that filmmakers such as Chris Marker, Alain Resnais,
Agnès Varda, Peter Greenaway and Raúl Ruiz, ‘have already chosen to refigure
the lines of their earlier experimentation through this analogy with new digital
interactive forms’.14 However, the modern auteur Buñuel produced a narrative
revolution: ‘his radical experimentation provides equally productive strategies for
advancing the art of interactive narrative in new digital forms’.15 She continues,
‘Buñuel’s films are full of surprising ruptures that reveal the radical potential of
the underlying database structure that usually lies hidden behind the story.’16
The radical experience of Surrealism and Freud’s theories are just some of the
elements that add to the narrative database Kinder talks about.
   In addition, one can observe audio-visual heritages, intertextual contaminations,
symbolic objects and a personal vision of society and its values. With this in
mind, Kinder refers to ‘interactive database narratives’,17 which, in the case of
Buñuel’s movies, express their potential on different levels:

         1. On the level of narrative drive: the reliance on incongruous objects or hot spots,
     rather than montage, as the primary means of navigating from one scene or discursive
     level to another;




13
   Kinder, p. 3.
14
   Ibidem.
15
   Ibidem.
16
   Ivi, p. 7.
17
   See Manovich.

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                                        Angela Bianca Saponari


          2. On the level of characterization: the use of puppet-like avatars who are not
      restricted by traditional notions of consistency, psychology, or narrative logic, but
      whom we nonetheless find fascinating, engaging, and illuminating;
          3. On the level of plot: the creation of a narrative field where story possibilities
      seem limitless, where randomness, repetition, and interruptions are rampant, and
      where search engines are motored by desire.18

   These three levels can be reconnected to the playful-narrative strategies of
the mind-game film. Thus, bearing Kinder’s considerations in mind too, I have
identified a group of Italian films — directed by auteurs who opt for complexity,
forcing the spectator into a never-ending reconsideration of the narrative element
(and not only) — which perfectly fit into the above-mentioned definition of
mind-game film, given by Elsaesser.
   The cinematic device is here used as a tool through which mental states can
be made visible, rather than merely offer a privileged perspective on the world.
In the years of the political crisis of a population shocked by conformism and
tragedies, specific Italian movies — though detached from the objective reality
— let that perspective be absorbed in playful and complex diegetic processes in
which the spectators could lose themselves and all the coordinates.
   Pier Paolo Pasolini, Elio Petri, Francesco Rosi and Marco Ferreri forced
spectators to re-organize their mental processes due to the recurrent diegetic
deviations in the plots of The 10th Victim (La decima vittima, 1965), Dillinger
Is Dead (Dillinger è morto, 1969), Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (Salò o le 120
giornate di Sodoma, 1975), Todo Modo (1976) and Illustrious Corpses (Cadaveri
eccellenti, 1976). However, they also invite spectators to review their relationship
with media devices (think of the dimension of play in The 10th Victim, which
perfectly introduces the presence of the videogames in the cinema of convergence),
and reconsider the dynamics of power (for example in Todo Modo, the mocking
of Democrazia Cristiana party and the interference of the Church in the State’s
affairs is highly symbolic).
   On the narrative level, character and plot development in the movies of
such directors (just as in Buñuel’s cinema) outline a disruptive, expressive
potentiality. Discussing Buñuel’s films, at a certain point Kinder raises the
following question about interactive storytelling: ‘How can we create engaging
interactive narratives that provide an array of pleasures both emotional
and intellectual, that don’t have clear-cut beginnings or endings are full of
interruptions, and that still offer a satisfying sense of drama and still make
us want to return to them again and again?’ She answers that some ‘films
provide compelling answers to these questions, primarily because [Buñuel]
enables us to see what’s at stake ideologically in his formal ruptures from
conventional practices. This is the kind of perception that is sorely lacking in



18
     Kinder, p. 8 [emphasis in the original].

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                         The Modernist Roots of the Mind-Game Film


cyberspace, despite all of the utopian rhetoric about self-authoring and its so-
called democratic decentering of master narratives and power.’19
   It is possible to apply Kinder’s strategies of analysis to the expressive potential
of narrative databases in other filmographies, too. For instance, in France, Alain
Resnais — a director that was particularly interested in the notion of catalogue as
an elaboration of historical memory — created a kind of cinema that resembles
the tiles of a work-in-progress mosaic built on the impossibility to escape from
the oblivion, an ‘interactive cinema’,20 where the spectator is invited to participate
in the construction of the sense of the narration.
   What Resnais does with stock images — consider the gigantic labyrinth in the
1956 movie Toute la mémoire du monde, the incipit of Hiroshima mon amour
(1959), or the extreme experimentation of 1993’s Smoking/No Smoking21 —
perfectly exemplifies the idea already developed by the director himself in his
early short films, that moreover characterizes many other European films.


A Case Study: Elio Petri’s Mediatic Universe

   On the basis of the model introduced in this essay, I use two strategies to
reinterpret a tendency of Italian cinema during the 1960s and 1970s, studying
in particular the political-moral dimension of its messages rather than the
originality of its formal solutions, as the locations where the ‘narrative database’
is developed.
   I have chosen the work of Petri mainly for two reasons: first, many of his films
found some success in the USA, to the extent that they influenced Hollywood
authors; second, his cinema is somewhat extemporaneous and isolated in the
broader Italian cinematographic tradition.
   In my opinion, this film-maker created provocative narrative constructions
by collecting, treating and archiving data available through an unusual fruition
procedure — Petri changed the ways through which spectators experienced
movies, eliminating clear reference points and replacing them with disorientation,
which appears to have become the director’s new ideological and aesthetic
target. Today, it is possible to approach his films with a new aesthetic sensibility
determined by our daily use of computer devices: indeed nowadays we see
original systems of visual and narrative organization, thanks to the practice of
searching for data.


19
   Ibidem.
20
   This is the concept of ‘interactive narrativity’, developed in Theory in Contemporary Art since
1985, ed. by Zoya Kocur and Simon Leung (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005).
21
   ‘The recursion of characters, actions, and times starts from an algorithmic platform and so does
the proceeding of time and space, common to Resnais’s cinema in general, which here is only
turned into mathematics, into a map. […] the movie may be categorized between Feydeau and
electronic elaboration, between the marivaudage and information technology.’ Sergio Arecco,
Alain Resnais o la persistenza della memoria (Recco, GE: Le mani, 1997), p. 163 (my translation).

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                                    Angela Bianca Saponari


  Petri and his collaborators developed these processes by rejecting realism and
creating stories that are supported by narrative databases. The latter consists of
quotes and reconstructed works of art, stock political images, objects representing
the society of consumption, and the stable presence of the media universe.
  I identify two narrative strategies within Petri’s cinema that make the interactive
dimension of the narrative databases emerge:

  1. On the level of narrative drive: the scenography as the primary means of
navigating from a discursive level to another;
  2. On the level of plot: the creation of a narrative field where story possibilities
seem limitless, where randomness, repetition and interruptions are rampant, and
where search engines are motored by political desire.

   The first aspect is the most apparent in Petri’s oeuvre. The levels of the story
contaminate one another by means of editing, and at times also through the
structure of the film’s set. Petri’s scenography allows him to value the relationship
between different visual levels and the characters, in iconic projects. In The 10th
Victim, Petri adapts a futuristic tale based on a short story by Robert Scheckley.
The film depicts ‘The Big Hunt’, a game in which a computer selects a hunter
and a victim, who must try to track and kill the other first. It is important to
note that they do not know each other. In the film, the chosen ones are Marcello
Mastroianni (Marcello, the victim) and Ursula Andress (Caroline, the hunter)
who ultimately choose marriage over murder. The game slogan in the movie is:
‘In a world where there will be no wars, people will keep on creating games to
have a chance to kill.’
   In this movie, which is moreover stylized like a videogame, the intrusiveness
of pop art (from makeup to costumes and scenography) allows the setting to be
transposed from reality to a science fiction dimension — a near future in which
technology and social control have prevailed over people’s freedom. This never-
ending shift from the present to the future blends the narrative levels into a
seductive aesthetic game. The vision of the future proposed by the film, however,
proved to be successful in a transmedia perspective, rather than influencing
contemporary film production: while Italian cinema did not develop a specific
tradition of science-fiction cinema, Petri nevertheless received several offers
from Milanese advertisers, along with huge financial resources to make a series
of commercials for Shell entitled Al di là della mente [Beyond the mind] and
another one for Salvarani furniture factories, with great success.
   The film inspires comparison with one of the latest reinterpretation of Sheckley’s
short story, in the Hunger Games franchise,22 where the idea of the future and
reality itself have ironically a more realistic connotation than in Petri’s movies.


22
  The Hunger Games film series consists of four science fiction dystopian adventure films based on
the eponymous trilogy of novels, by the American author Suzanne Collins, and directed by Gary
Ross (The Hunger Games, 2012) and Francis Lawrence (The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, 2013;

90
                         The Modernist Roots of the Mind-Game Film


   Contrary to common interpretations, by chasing pop art — or rather the most
experimental tendencies of the 1960s American neo-avant garde, and specifically
optical art — Petri chooses a new language, and one which is generally not
employed for political criticism or condemnation of mass society. The director
therefore observes the changes that society is undergoing and makes an analysis
of the new expressive languages of mass-communication, using them for solely
artistic purposes.23
   The scenography, chromatic photography and the framing composition itself
are used consciously, as a precise citation or ‘re-use’ that leads to a ‘disorientating
point of view, capable of unveiling the real’,24 leading the spectators to become
gradually disappointed in reality, which is depicted as misleading and vacuous.
   In the repossession sequence, in Marcello’s house, a singular panel stands out
on a wall: a painting with a huge moving eye, whose eyelid opens and closes
and whose fixed sight turns into a metaphor of the constant control imposed on
people (fig. 1). This is a reference to the contemporary investigations of sight,
the eye and the moving image in the work of the British artist Joe Tilson, and
specifically a quotation of the work Look! (1964) (fig. 2). In the same house ‘lives’
Tommaso, whom the protagonist considers his best friend: in reality, the object
is a New Dada assemblage, doll legs and a wire body, microchips and electric
circuits, a sort of ‘pop Frankenstein’ that recalls contemporary experiments in
Kinetic Art and becomes a fetish, an avatar, a comforting machine (fig. 3).
   The same scene provides an occasion to focus our attention on another
recurring element in the movie, that is essential to pop language: comic books,
which are strongly present in one of the next scenes, in particular through a
scenographic reference to Roy Lichtenstein (figs 4–5). In some scenes, the frame
composition is even inspired by the language of comics: a recurring use of the frame
within the frame, and elements that divide the images into sections (figs 6–7–8).
   The strong feeling of dehumanization is perceived in another setting of the
movie, Lidia’s house. Here, both the garden and the interiors are rich with
human figures in different positions (figs 9–10). This is a reference to George
Segal’s chalk moulds, and in fact one of the figures is an accurate copy. What
emerges is a very strong sense of alienation, solitude and anxiety, reflecting the
human response to a depersonalizing society.
   Within this existentialist imagery, it is possible to identify references to the
works of Robert Rauschenberg, Jannis Kounellis, and many other artists. A huge
amount of data, pieces of information, and messages cross the images of the




The Hunger Games: Mockingjay — Part 1, 2014; The Hunger Games: Mockingjay — Part 2, 2015).
23
   His subsequent film, A Place in the Country (Un tranquillo posto di campagna, 1968) is also
visually influenced by the pop artists Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Claes Oldenburg and
Jim Dine, who fascinated the Venice Art Biennale in 1964.
24
   Lucia Cardone, Elio Petri, impolitico. La decima vittima (Pisa: Edizioni ETS, 2005), p. 55 (my
translation).

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                               Angela Bianca Saponari


film, and communicate to us the sense of a narrative operation that is built on
accumulating and archiving the visual experiences of a unique director.
   Petri continued to create narrative databases in his Oscar-winning Investigation
of a Citizen Above Suspicion (Indagine su un cittadino al di sopra di ogni sospetto,
1970). Here Petri reinterprets a taste for the surreal. As many critics have
observed, Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion is not only a powerful
social condemnation and a forerunner of Italian detective films, but the story
also has a metaphoric dimension: the plot is constructed through hallucinations
and distorted visual apparatuses. Aside from its social component, one can
thus observe a significant process of narrative construction, supported by great
visionary talent and by the decision to relay actions and characters through a
‘deforming’ lens.
   The same happens in The Working Class Goes to Heaven (La classe operaia
va in paradiso, 1971), where Petri underlines the contrast between a domestic
setting, the middle-class victim of exasperated consumerism, and that of the
working class, characterized by class struggle. The first emerges in the interiors
of a house that is full of questionable objects that have been bought and hoarded
over the years. At the end, the protagonist makes a list of the useless objects,
and for each one he recalls its price and the hours of piece work necessary to
buy it: inflatable animals, prizes gained from collecting points, stuffed animals,
small statues, paintings, electrical appliances which have never been used, sofas
covered with cellophane, all chosen by Petri to represent the contemporary
commercial context (figs 11a, 11b, 11c, 11d, 11e). The protagonist then releases
his rage by destroying an inflatable animal (Scrooge McDuck) that was framed
from the beginning of the movie and stands as a symbol of capitalism in Disney
comic strips.
   The factory where the movie was shot (the Falconi factory in Novara) is a
place of work, order and of the mechanic passing of time. The scenographer
Dante Ferretti renders it as a cold space, whose protagonist is a huge pop hand,
a symbol of the boss’s oppression of the workmen.
   The fight between these two narrative universes produces the visionary
madness of the protagonist’s dream, which he screams aloud but it goes unheard
over the deafening, rhythmic noise of the factory.
   From the narrative point of view, Petri’s films, like those of Marco Ferreri’s,
are labyrinthine paths that are structured over the conflict between randomness
and order, where the characters are led by hallucinations, nightmares, and wishes
that are far from reality.
   In this distorted behaviour, there is often a strong psychological element
determined by the need for the political affirmation of the ego in mass-society.
   In The 10th Victim, a film that is built on a videogame narrative model, the
characters pass each level according to the strength of the media that pushes
them ahead. Thanks to exaggeration and paradox, coherent with the pop art
aesthetic principles, the film’s narrative structure is organized in aesthetically
recognizable frames, organized groups of TV commercials, and advertising shoots.

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Prophetically, the film narrates the spectacularization of crime; moreover, the
plot seems to develop according to the needs expressed by the TV commercials,
rather than to the individual choices of the protagonists.
   The movie A Quiet Place in the Country (Un tranquillo posto di campagna,
1968) alternates between different narrative levels, which coincide with the
protagonist’s hallucinations and nightmares. He is a painter suffering from
a creative crisis, who overlaps reality with his grotesque deformations: it thus
becomes a real mind-game film, a visual labyrinth in which the protagonist moves
in a condition of confusion determined by dissatisfaction and by reflection on
the need to express himself through creative action (figs 12a and 12b). This is
revealed in the explicit reference to René Magritte’s two Perspectives (figs 13a
and 13b), creating a feeling of death (of the arts) within a film about desperation
and schizophrenia.
   Petri reached the highest peak of experimentation with the so-called ‘political
trilogy’ that included his next three movies, in chronological order. First,
Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion is the story of a man who challenges
reality, creating a second narrative level in order to narrate himself and the crime
he has committed: on the one hand, this provides an illusion of reality — nobody
thinks that he could break the law, considering his professional position; on the
other hand, there is the truth of his narration — as he continues to declare that
he is guilty. The open conclusion, which is connected to the beginning of the
story, amplifies the narrative ambiguity of the movie and complicates even more
the meaning of the story, which in turn is built on flashbacks within the illusion
of a structured narrative. The fact that none of the other characters accept his
account means that it fails in its primary function.
   In Todo Modo, Petri created perhaps his most fascinating narrative labyrinth.
Through the metaphor of the mysterious messages in spiritual exercises, that are
carried out in an enclosed place at the end of the world (Zafer’s refuge), Petri
dares to construct a story with no plot, where the characters obsessively follow
the rules of a spiritual father. Each narrative level corresponds to a different step
of the Rosary prayer, each one leading to a new discursive dimension. As though
drowning in the circles of Hell, the characters step down into gloomier and
gloomier dimensions in a never-ending reiteration (fig. 14), enacting a repetition
compulsion that resembles Buñuel’s obsessive circularity, as recalled by Kinder.
   Though the characters in the figurative dimension pray and appear confused
by the methodic activity of taking care of the soul, in reality — which is only
evoked — they continue to intermingle their illegal traffic and their power
plays. This produces two discursive dimensions which confuse the spectator:
each narrative level corresponds to a character’s destiny. Nobody, apart perhaps
from Don Gaetano, knows the meaning of what happens. He seems to have
the power in his hands, but only in view of his comprehension that there is
no more power, nor State, nor God. Within the narrative, he owns the tools
that cause this collapse. However, the real instigator is another character, M.,
the politician who is thirsty for power and salvation, for sin and forgiveness,

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for glory and death. His exaggerated desire leads him to push Don Gaetano
towards a higher narrative level, triggering the collapse of the entire system.
   Petri’s films provide an interesting example of narrative structures that are
overloaded with information, thus disrupting artistic operations. They are
effective cultural products even for the contemporary spectator, who can find in
those narrative databases a profound operation of cultural politics.


Conclusion

   In these examples, as in many other related films, it is possible to trace an
interactive dimension of modern cinema whose narrative levels are upset by the
expressive urgency of directors who want to recount reality in a new way. In
these films, the irregular and non-conventional discursive dimension is the real
protagonist, building in turn a new and more stimulating relationship with the
audience. As Kristen Daly states:

         This type of community, complexity, and multimedia intertextuality was
     available before digital and computer technologies. The French New Wave and
     its community in Cahiers du Cinéma and other journals and cineclubs of the
     time was a networked and intertextual form of cinema experience. But this took
     place solely in a handful of urban centers and required great effort and an almost
     cultlike commitment. Henry Jenkins has traced the history of fan communities
     before the Internet, focusing on science fiction fan communities who interacted
     via letters, conventions, and fanzines; as he notes, the fans have moved from
     the boundaries to become increasingly powerful communities. Indeed, the fan
     mode of interactive and intertextual engagement with the text has become, I
     would argue, a more prevalent viewing mode as it has become easier and almost
     unavoidable, particularly in respect to big-budget movies advertised in every
     medium.25

   Probably, the difference between the mind-game film and Petri’s movies —
like other auteur movies from those years — can be seen in the socio-cultural
dynamics that are underway, which progressively transformed the approach
to a logic-narrative knowledge into new forms of connectivity, ruled by the
irregularity of the database and by the model through which one surfs the net.
However, according to what emerges in Daly’s analysis, the main difference lies
in the transformation of the spectators and their habits.
   As noted earlier, modern cinema addressed an exclusive branch of spectators
who allowed themselves to be overwhelmed by the visual experience, which they
nevertheless found shocking even for political reasons when compared to the


25
  Kristen Daly, ‘Cinema 3.0: The Interactive-Image’, Cinema Journal, 50.1 (2010), 81–98 (p. 85).
See also Henry Jenkins, ‘Interactive Audiences? The “Collective Intelligence” of Media Fans’, in
The New Media Book, ed. by Dan Harries (London: BFI, 2002), pp. 157–70.

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imposition of mainstream culture; in other words, a branch of spectators that
were often influenced ideologically, and hence capable of abandoning themselves
to directors who they recognized for their values and poetics. Conversely, today
the mind-game film addresses a mass public that is influenced and characterized
by a huge amount of uncertainty.
    The predominant mood in the society of control26 stems from collapsing
boundaries around, and between, institutions, which is furthermore defined by
‘epistemological problems [...] and ontological doubts’.27 In other words, the
concepts of who we are and what constitutes knowledge of ourselves and our
environments have become blurred.
    In the case of the mind-game film, the spectator begins from a different
condition: it is not only a matter of uncertainty. Thomas Elsaesser claims
that social change has brought about a sort of madness which has become an
‘appropriate’ state of mind for living in a society of control. ‘Paranoia [...] is
[...] the appropriate — or even “productive” pathology of our contemporary
network society.’28
    These movies are not only defined by the presence of characters who are living
in a deep crisis, and are victims of some sort of trauma. They are also defined by
the epistemological problems (how do we know what we know?) and ontological
doubts (which other worlds? Which other minds?) that are among the main
touchpoints of philosophical investigations of conscience, mind, multiple
realities and possible worlds.29
    They represent a disturbing and paranoid dimension, yet it is one to which
humanity has always been sentenced.




26
   See Gilles Deleuze, ‘Post-scriptum sur les sociétés de contrôle’, L’autre journal, 1 (May 1990)
(repr. in Deleuze, Pourparlers (1972-1990) (Paris: Editions Minuit, 1990), pp. 240–47.
27
   Elsaesser, p. 15.
28
   Ivi, p. 26.
29
    See Andrea Minuz, ‘Guardare i film (e le cose) da capo: come imparammo qualcosa di
profondamente cinematografico sulla filosofia’, IMAGO. Studi di cinema e media, 1.2 (special issue
Cinemafilosofia, ed. by Paolo Bertetto and Minuz, 2010), pp. 163–76.

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        Fig. 1. The 10th Victim (La decima vittima, 1965).
     A painting with a huge moving eye in Marcello’s house.




               Fig. 2. Look! (1964) by Joe Tilson.




        Fig. 3. The 10th Victim (La decima vittima, 1965).
          Tommaso, Marcello’s inorganic best friend.




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Figs 4–5. The 10th Victim (La decima vittima, 1965).
   Scenographic reference to Roy Lichtenstein.




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                     Angela Bianca Saponari




       Figs 6–7–8. The 10th Victim (La decima vittima, 1965).
     Composition of scenes inspired by the language of comics.




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    The Modernist Roots of the Mind-Game Film




Figs 9–10. The 10th Victim (La decima vittima, 1965).
Human figures in different positions in Lidia’s house.




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            Figs 11a, 11b, 11c, 11d, 11e. The Working Class Goes to Heaven
      (La classe operaia va in paradiso, 1971), contemporary commercial context.


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               Figs 12a-12b. A Quiet Place in the Country
    (Un tranquillo posto di campagna, 1968). Leonardo’s hallucination.




                   Fig. 13a. A Quiet Place in the Country
(Un tranquillo posto di campagna, 1968). Leonardo visits his mother’s house.




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      Fig. 13b. René Magritte, Perspective I: Madame Récamier de David, 1950.




                      Fig. 14. Todo Modo (Id., 1976). Scene.




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