Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch The Working Class Goes to Heaven
1971 · Elio Petri · The Working Class Goes to Heaven on Sightlines
4 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Notice how short and hammering the cuts are at the lathe. (cutting)
Petri builds the factory scenes from quick, repeated shots that mimic the tempo of piece-work, turning the machine's rhythm into the film's own editing rhythm.
Payoff: You feel the assault of the workday on your own nerves, not just Lulù's. In the reading: Dialectical (Soviet) montage. The reading traces this to Soviet dialectical montage: cutting meant to strike the nervous system and force a thought.
Listen for the factory noise mixed as loud as the dialogue. (sound)
Morricone's score uses harsh, machine-like figures that blur into the plant's actual clangor, so you can no longer tell composed music from the sound of the floor.
Payoff: The noise stops feeling like background and starts feeling like it is coming from inside Lulù.
Watch how close the camera stays to Lulù at his lathe. (camera)
Kuveiller's camera prowls around his hands and chest and rarely backs off far enough to show the shop past his shoulder.
Payoff: The framing puts you at the machine with him instead of letting you watch from a safe distance.
Notice how crowded and airless every room in this film is. (staging)
The plant, the union hall, the apartment are each staged as their own version of confinement, bodies kept in near-constant collision with no private space.
Payoff: Even the reward for working overtime is its own kind of trap.
Once you have seen it
Watch how often the injured hand returns after the accident. (performance)
The missing finger keeps resurfacing as the one piece of evidence in the film that argues successfully, more than any speech from the union or the students.
Payoff: A part of his body ends up carrying more force than anything anyone says. In the reading: Fetish (part-object). The reading calls this a fetish: a part torn from the body and charged with more force than speech.
Track what actually changes between Lulù getting fired and reinstated. (structure)
Both the union's reformism and the students' slogans push and pull at him, and the film ends without settling which one, if either, actually spoke for him.
Payoff: Nothing is resolved, which is itself the film's argument about who gets to speak for the working class. In the reading: The people are missing. The reading calls this the people are missing: no movement in the film can claim to speak for a unified working class.
Watch the old worker Lulù meets inside the institution. (performance)
Salvo Randone plays a man consumed and discarded by the same system, and the film lets you see Lulù looking at him without yet recognizing his own future.
Payoff: The film shows you where this system deposits the used up, well before it happens to him.
Carry this in: Watch his hands at the lathe. The film measures a life entirely by the speed of the machine feeding it.