New York – On the occasion of The Criterion Collection’s release of “Indagine di un cittadino al di sopra di ogni sospetto (Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion)”, the movie will be screened today at the Casa Italiana Zerilli Marimò of New York, the Italian Department of the New York University. The provocative Italian filmmaker Elio Petri’s most internationally acclaimed work is this remarkable, visceral, Oscar-winning thriller. Petri maintains a tricky balance between absurdity and realism in telling the Kafkaesque tale of a Roman police inspector (a commanding Gian Maria Volonté) investigating a heinous crime, which he himself committed. Both a compelling character study and a disturbing commentary on the draconian government crackdowns in Italy in the late 1960s and early ’70s, Petri’s kinetic portrait of surreal bureaucracy is a perversely pleasurable rendering of controlled chaos. The screening will be followed by a panel discussion with Kim Hendrickson, from The Criterion Collection, and David Forgacs, Antonio Monda and Stefano Albertini from NYU. (9Colonne)
