Sightlines · a reading

A Deleuzian reading of Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion

1970 · Elio Petri · Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion on Sightlines

A man kills his lover in the first minutes of Elio Petri's film. Then he does something stranger. He stays. He moves through her apartment putting things in place, leaving traces of himself where any detective would look, with the calm care of a director blocking a scene. He runs a homicide squad in Rome. The film never gives him an ordinary name. He is the Inspector, a title in a suit. Gian Maria Volonté plays him, and behind him Ennio Morricone's score keeps time like a machine that has been switched on and won't switch off.

So the whodunit is over before it begins. We know who did it. Petri asks a colder question instead: if the guilty man hands the state the evidence himself, will the state take it?

It won't. That is the film.

The detective story is the purest version of what Deleuze calls the small form of the action-image. A clue, a small act or object, reveals a situation that was hidden, and once it is revealed the situation can be acted on. Petri turns this machine inside out. Nothing is hidden. The situation is shown to us in full at the start, and the clues pile up in plain sight. What the film studies is whether anyone will read them.

Deleuze has two terms that fit this almost too well. A mark is something that means what it means because of habit: when you see X, you expect Y. A demark is the thing that breaks the habit, the anomaly that stops you and makes you think. Every clue in a mystery is supposed to work as a demark. The Inspector's clues are as loud as demarks get, and his colleagues keep reading them as marks. Their habit says that a man of his rank is above suspicion. So every trace that points at him gets folded back into routine and explained away. This is why the lens is worth using. It shows that the film's real subject isn't one man's guilt. It is the habits of seeing that power installs in the people who serve it. Deleuze calls this layer the relation-image: meaning lives in the relations we hold in our heads, and Petri makes us the only party in the room still reading them honestly.

Watch how he stages it. The Inspector walks through headquarters performing his own importance, and his subordinates perform their deference back to him. Objects and gestures come back with near-Brechtian emphasis, so that we read the behavior as a demonstration instead of sinking into the man's psychology. Brecht called this kind of revealing posture the gestus, and Deleuze takes the word up as the gest: a bodily attitude that lays bare a social relation. Volonté's swagger is one. The clerks' lowered eyes are another. The film is built from these postures. Even the crime scene is a gest, evidence arranged as a figure to be looked at instead of an act to be hidden. That is the reflection-image, where action is turned into spectacle and argument.

Luigi Kuveiller's camera gives the argument a shape. His wide-angle frames place the Inspector at the center of compositions that seem to organize the world around him, then tip that authority with low angles and warped closeness. The long corridors and echoing halls dwarf everyone in them. Deleuze would call each of these frames a closed system, and this one is a system of rank. The debt to Welles's The Trial is direct: the same disorienting lenses and the same cavernous bureaucratic architecture that crushes the person inside it.

Ruggero Mastroianni's editing breaks the present apart with flashbacks to the affair with Augusta Terzi. These are classic recollection-images, dated pieces of a former present, and they arrive in warmer, more sensual color against the institutional grays and cold blues. Florinda Bolkan plays Augusta as both lover and goad, the one person who saw the impotence and cruelty under the uniform. The cuts don't simply explain the past. They talk back to the present. The public man of law and order is set beside the private man she exposed, and the gap between them becomes the joke and the horror. The structure comes from Citizen Kane, where a powerful man is rebuilt from flashbacks intercut with a present-tense inquiry. Petri sharpens it into irony.

Here the film touches something Deleuze saw breaking in postwar cinema, the crisis of the action-image. In classical film an act produces its consequence. The Inspector acts, again and again, more and more openly, and nothing follows. The chain from act to consequence doesn't snap inside the hero. It snaps inside the institution. One of Deleuze's signs of this crisis is the condemnation of the plot, the sense of a diffuse plot behind the plot. In Petri there's no secret cabal. The plot behind the plot is the order protecting itself out of reflex. That is more frightening, because nobody has to decide anything.

The film is framed by Kafka's words about the law's power over the individual. It's a discourse-image, a problem put to us that the film refuses to solve. Deleuze and Guattari read Kafka's law as endless postponement, a judgment that never comes. Volonté's Inspector seems to want that judgment, and the machine won't give it to him.

The lineage is easy to trace. From Francesco Rosi's Salvatore Giuliano Petri takes the inchiesta, the reconstruction that indicts a whole institution instead of a single culprit. From Rosi's Hands Over the City he takes Volonté himself, already cast as the face of civic power. Costa-Gavras's Z gave him the template he openly acknowledged: investigative flashback montage and a mordant indictment of a state cover-up. The Battle of Algiers supplied the marching, insistent menace Morricone turns into this film's pulse. In turn, the film helped define the cinema politico cycle and the denunciation thrillers of Rosi and Damiani. Petri went on to anatomize labor and property in The Working Class Goes to Heaven and Property Is No Longer a Theft. It also stands as the rebuke to the poliziottesco that boomed later in the decade, which celebrated the hard cop that Petri dissects.

Its significance is that it took the most reliable story cinema had, the investigation, and made it fail on purpose, so that the failure itself became the evidence. It won the Grand Prix at Cannes and the Academy Award, which proved that a stylized, furious political film could travel.

When you watch it again, take your eyes off Volonté for a while. Watch the functionaries around him. Watch them see, and decline to know. The film is investigating them, and it is quietly asking what you would decline to know too.

Concepts in play

action-image (small form), inverted — The detective structure, where a clue discloses a hidden situation, is turned inside out: the killing happens in the opening minutes and the clues are planted in plain sight
mark — The colleagues' habit (a man of the Inspector's rank is above suspicion) turns every incriminating trace into routine
demark — The evidence the Inspector deliberately leaves against himself is an anomaly that should force interpretation, yet the system refuses to read it
relation-image (the mental image) — Meaning rests on relations the audience holds (we watched the crime) against the institution's habitual reading; the mounting irony belongs to the viewer as knowing third
the gest — Petri stages the Inspector's movements as a theater of dominance, with subordinates performing deference; objects and gestures recur with near-Brechtian emphasis as demonstrations of a thesis about power
reflection-image (the Figure) — The Inspector arranges evidence the way a director blocks a scene, so the crime becomes a staged figure and demonstration instead of a concealed act
the frame (closed set) — Kuveiller's wide-angle compositions center the Inspector as if organizing the world around his authority, then destabilize it with low angles while corridors and halls dwarf the figures
recollection-image — Mastroianni intercuts flashbacks to the affair with Augusta Terzi, in warmer tones against institutional grays, that erupt into and comment on the present investigation
crisis of the action-image — The Inspector's escalating self-incriminating acts never produce their consequence; the system's structural incapacity to investigate itself breaks the link between act and result
condemnation of the plot — The plot behind the plot is no conspiracy but the self-protecting order itself, an all-encompassing bureaucratic machine heard in typewriters, telephones and echoing rooms
discourse-image — The film is framed by Kafka's words about the law's power over the individual, posing a parable about guilt and the impossibility of justice that it leaves unresolved

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