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Bernardo Bertolucci's Il conformista (1970)
Gillo Pontecorvo's La battaglia di Algeri (1966)
Petri's Indagine su un cittadino al di sopra di ogni sospetto (1970)
Marco Ferreri's La Grande Bouffe (1973)
Ermanno Olmi's L'albero degli zoccoli (1978)
It has been said that Italian cinema lives almost entirely in the present. Consequently, whenever a key phase passes all that remains is a vacuum. This was certainly true of the 1970s. Production levels remained high. But, as the old guard passed, only a handful of original talents emerged, among them Marco Bellochio, Ettore Scola, Marco Ferreri and Paolo and Vittorio Taviani. Moreover, audiences preferred television to the endless round of mediocre genre pictures, which were increasingly riddled with soft-porn interludes.
However, an economic downturn and the threat to liberty posed by terrorism and the mafia did lead to a proliferation of political cinema.
Gillo Pontecorvo's La battaglia di Algeri (The Battle of Algiers) (1966) considered the colonial question, while Bernardo Bertolucci examined the legacy of Fascism in Il conformista (The Conformist) (1970) and La strategia del ragno (The Spider's Stratagem) (1972). Elio Petri exposed legal and governmental corruption in Indagine su un cittadino al di sopra di ogni sospetto (Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion) (1969) and chronicled the class struggle in La classe operaia va in paradiso (The Working Class Goes to Heaven) (1971), while ramifications of crime and civil unrest were highlighted in Francesco Rosi's Cadaveri eccellenti (Illustrious Corpses) (1976) and Tre fratelli (Three Brothers) (1980).
David Parkinson
