The pedagogy of political film. Elio Petri’s Todo Modo

Abstract

Elio Petri’s Todo Modo (1976) – based on Sciascia’s novel – features Marcello Mastroianni as a priest in charge of a group of politicians from the ruling party of the Christian Democracy on a spiritual retreat in a hotel. Here they begin to die one by one in unexplained circumstances. Petri’s declared aim was to damage the party as much as possible. The intention – which also motivates the distance from Sciascia – was to delimit a specific reality so to embed its distortions into the fabric of the film. However, the film was received mainly as an allegorical representation. This article argues that Todo Modo is both an effective example of European political cinema from the 1970s, because of the specificity of its analysis, and a lesson for political cinema in general. The film shows the need for political cinema’s pedagogical efforts to embrace reality’s distortions, rather than attempting to elucidate them.