Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of The Organizer
1963 · Mario Monicelli · The Organizer on Sightlines
A man loses his hand to a machine at the end of a fourteen-hour shift. That is how the trouble starts in Mario Monicelli's The Organizer, and what follows is worth watching closely. Nobody riots and nobody gives a speech. People talk. Workers in a Turin textile mill near the end of the nineteenth century stand around in the steam of an unheated dawn, cold and tired, and start to wonder out loud whether fourteen hours is a law of nature. They are angry, and the anger has no shape yet.
The Italian title is I compagni, "The Comrades," and it is the more honest name. The film's subject is a group of people learning, slowly and with plenty of jokes along the way, to become a group.
Gilles Deleuze, the French philosopher who wrote two books on cinema, gives us a useful tool here. He called the main engine of classical filmmaking the action-image: a character takes in a situation and acts to change it, and the changed situation leads to the next act. His shorthand was S-A-S'. In its "large form" the situation comes first and it is huge. It closes in on the characters until someone has to make a decisive move. Westerns work this way, and so do war films and epics of nations and classes.
The Organizer has a situation that is almost unbearably large. Deleuze calls this encompassing world the synsign, the milieu that surrounds people, gets into them, and calls for a response. Giuseppe Rotunno, who shot the film and later worked with Fellini, builds that milieu out of soot and cold light. The factory floor is a cavern, and dust hangs in the shafts of window light. He weights the gray toward black, so faces and banners have to push their way out of the murk. The machines never stop making noise. The winter exteriors were shot in Yugoslavia and they actually look punishing. You don't watch this world so much as shiver in it.
The large form also needs a duel, which Deleuze calls the binomial: force against force, workers against owners. This is where Monicelli does something interesting. One side of the duel doesn't exist yet. The owners are organized. The workers are a crowd of individuals who bicker, hesitate, want their wages, and fear their landlords. Before anyone can act on the situation, somebody has to make the actor.
That somebody is Professor Sinigaglia, and he is Monicelli's best idea. Marcello Mastroianni, the most glamorous face in European cinema, plays him threadbare and bespectacled, always hungry and always one step ahead of the police. He's faintly ridiculous. He gives the workers words, strategy, and a sense that their grievance has a form, and he is never quite in control of what he starts. The film puts the hero of the action-image in front of us and keeps letting the air out of him. It doesn't do this out of cynicism. Monicelli and his co-writers Age and Scarpelli want us to see that the group is the protagonist, and the professor is its catalyst, its conscience and sometimes its comic relief.
This is the film's argument with its great ancestor. In Eisenstein's Strike (1925) the workforce is already one collective body moving in choreographed masses. Deleuze has a word for a crowd rendered as a single feeling unit: the dividual. Later he made a sharp observation about political cinema. In Eisenstein, he said, the people are already there, on screen and in history, ready to act. Modern political cinema starts from the opposite fact: the people are missing and have to be invented. The Organizer sits right on that seam. It tells a nineteenth-century story in the classical mode, but its real drama is the gap between a crowd and a "we." Monicelli makes us feel how much has to happen, and how fragile all of it is, before Eisenstein's single body can appear.
Pay attention to the frame as you watch. Rotunno and Monicelli keep setting the lone figure against the mass, the organizer framed inside ranks of workers or dwarfed by them. That compositional grammar goes back to Metropolis (1927), where laborers funnel through industrial architecture as an anonymous flood. Here the grammar asks a question instead. In each big staging, do the bodies close up into a line or scatter? Monicelli choreographs large groups so that you can read the surge and the individual flinches inside it at the same time.
The jokes matter too. Chaplin's Modern Times (1936) first got comedy out of a body ground down by the assembly line, and Monicelli takes over that fusion whole. The workers are funny in the way real people are funny, in their quarrels, their vanities and their tavern arguments, and the film lets a scene stay funny until suddenly it isn't. In the comedy the individuals stay individuals inside the collective. A dividual that couldn't laugh would just be a mass.
The other half of the inheritance is Italian. Bicycle Thieves gave Monicelli the neorealist commitment to a working man's concrete economic trouble. Visconti's La Terra Trema gave him the structure: a community of exploited laborers organizing against their bosses, with the collective carried across an ensemble rather than pinned on one hero. Umberto D. gave him the refusal to console. André Bazin prized neorealism for letting reality keep its weight and ambiguity. Deleuze went further and argued that neorealism was where the action-image first cracked: its characters increasingly could only look and endure. Monicelli takes that neorealist ground, with poverty presented as a physical condition and boarding houses furnished down to the last detail, and asks whether people on that ground can still act together. The large form comes back, but it has to be earned scene by scene and nothing guarantees it.
That's what the film did for its art form. It showed that the commedia all'italiana, a genre built for satire, could carry real historical weight, a project Monicelli had begun with The Great War. The Academy noticed and nominated the screenplay, a rare honor for a subtitled film about a strike. The deeper achievement is moral and formal at once. Monicelli trusts that laughter and solidarity come out of the same bodies.
So when you watch, or watch again, keep an eye on the edges of the crowd: who leans in, who hangs back, who cracks a joke at the worst possible moment. The film is asking, scene by scene, what it takes for a crowd to start saying "we."
Concepts in play
- action-image (large form) — A global situation, the fourteen-hour mill regime brought to a head when a worker loses a hand, presses on the workforce until collective action becomes necessary; the film follows the classic strike shape of grievance, hesitation, organization and escalation.
- the encompasser (synsign) — Rotunno's soot-and-cold-light Turin: steam in unheated dawns, factory dust in shafts of window light, a grayscale weighted to black, constant machine noise, punishing winter exteriors shot in Yugoslavia.
- binomial — The workers-versus-owners duel the strike requires, complicated because the workers' side has to be built out of bickering, hesitant individuals before it can act.
- dividual — The inheritance from Strike (1925) of the workforce as one collective protagonist in choreographed mass movement, which Monicelli stages as something still forming, reading the collective surge and the individual hesitations together.
- the people are missing — The workers begin as 'half-formed anger' with no collective form; the film's drama is the making of a 'we' (the title I compagni), with Sinigaglia supplying language and strategy to a group that doesn't yet exist as a political actor.
- the closed set (cadre) — Compositions that repeatedly set the lone organizer within or dwarfed by ranks of workers, the individual-versus-mass grammar inherited from Metropolis, with blocking that shows whether bodies cohere into a line or scatter.