Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of The Working Class Goes to Heaven
1971 · Elio Petri · The Working Class Goes to Heaven on Sightlines
The camera will not leave him alone at the lathe. It prowls, it crowds his hands and his chest, and it never backs off far enough to let you see the shop past his shoulder. Lulù Massa keeps feeding the machine anyway. He is the fastest piece-worker on the floor, faster than the quota, and management loves him for it, because his numbers are the lever they use to raise everyone else's. Then the lathe takes a finger. It is a small wound in a very loud film, and it is the hinge of the whole thing: the piece-rate finally took a piece.
Hold on that missing finger. Petri's film is inside it.
The obvious objection to bringing Deleuze here is fair. His cinema books mostly concern films where people stop being able to act, the postwar drift, the character who can only look. Lulù does nothing but act, at a hysterical frequency, for the whole film. So what is the lens for?
It is for this, because Deleuze has a category for this kind of energy and it is not the action-image. The action-image is the ordinary engine of movies: a character sees a situation and acts to change it, and the act resolves the situation. Underneath it Deleuze finds the impulse-image, a cinema not of decisions but of drives. Appetite, compulsion, repetition, degradation. What looks like action in this register is really a symptom, the surface twitch of a drive the character does not control and cannot name. Deleuze calls the mode naturalism, after Zola, and its premise is that a man's behaviour is not his own. Lulù's productivism is not ambition. It is a compulsion with a tempo, and the tempo belongs to the lathe.
The severed finger is the other signature of that image, what Deleuze calls a fetish: a part-object torn from a body and charged with more force than any speech in the film. It is the only thing in the movie that argues successfully.
Naturalism also has a geography. The naturalist film gives you a real, concrete place, the derived milieu, then peels it back to show an originary world underneath, a savage zone of pure appetite where things get used up. Petri builds a sequence of derived milieux, each a variant of confinement: the metalworks, the union hall, the crowded apartment, the psychiatric institution where an old worker has been broken by the same system. He stages every one as the same devouring place. The factory is dressed to overwhelm, dense with equipment and human traffic, bodies in near-constant collision, so that Lulù is never granted a private inch. The consumer apartment his overtime pays for is the same trap with better furniture.
Originary worlds run one direction. Deleuze calls it the line of slope, everything sliding downhill toward exhaustion. Petri shows you the bottom of the slope early, in Salvo Randone's old worker, consumed and discarded, a man Lulù looks at while thinking he is looking at someone else.
Now the part where the film argues with its own ancestors. The editing at the machine is percussive, short hammering shots that turn repetitive manual labour into a kind of cinematic tachycardia. That cadence comes from Eisenstein's Strike (1925), which invented the business of syncing cutting rhythm to machinery and massed labour. Eisenstein's dialectical montage worked by collision: two shots slammed together so that a third thing jumps out of the gap, an idea, a mass becoming one body. Deleuze names the ambition behind it the spiritual automaton, the belief that an image can strike the nervous system directly and force the brain to think. Thought delivered as shock, no argument required.
Petri runs that experiment honestly and reports what happened. The shock lands. The thought does not. Factory clangor is mixed up over the dialogue instead of tucked beneath it, and Morricone's score, machine-like and dissonant, interlocks with the noise until composed music and plant acoustics stop being separable. As Lulù comes apart, the cutting fragments with him. Eisenstein's collisions were meant to produce a class. Petri's produce a nervous system, and only one man's. That is the film's finding, not its failure.
Volonté's performance is the other half of the finding. Deleuze, following Brecht, uses gest for a posture that exposes a social relation rather than a psychology. Lulù's cadence at the lathe is a gest: the wage relation made visible as a body's tempo, before anyone says a word about it. Chaplin got there first, feeding the body literally through the gears in Modern Times; Petri keeps the gears where they belong and puts the tempo in the man. And Volonté plays it loud, abrasive, deliberately unlovable, refusing the ennobled worker. That refusal is what lets the body be read as a diagram instead of a portrait.
Petri never observes Lulù from outside. Kuveiller's camera is nervy and kinetic where a documentarian would be composed; the staging tips toward caricature where a realist would hold back. Il Posto (1961) had already shown Italian cinema how to film salaried work as spiritual deadening through sober observed routine, and Petri takes that tradition and inflates it until it screams. The polemic runs through one overwhelming subjectivity, so the director's rage and the worker's derangement arrive in the same image and cannot be pulled apart. Deleuze, after Pasolini, calls this free indirect discourse: the author seeing through a character who is simultaneously seeing for the author.
Which brings us to the film's real subject. The union hall arguments, the student slogans, the meetings that stage debate as event, are what Deleuze calls discourse-images, images that pose a problem they cannot resolve. Lulù is fired. Lulù is reinstated. Nothing is settled. Here the film earns its place in what Deleuze calls modern political cinema, which begins at the moment the people are missing, when a filmmaker can no longer assume a unified people whose consciousness his film simply expresses, and has to work inside that absence. Eisenstein had a people. Petri, working in 1971 with the shop floors of Turin and Milan in open revolt after the Hot Autumn, has factions: an institutional union offering measured reformism, students offering maximalism, and between them a star piece-worker nobody's movement wants. The Italian left fought bitterly over this film. That fight is a measure of how accurately it reported.
Two more debts complete the picture. Metropolis (1927) gave Petri the factory as a devouring machine-organism, and you feel that expressionist charge whenever the plant behaves like something with an appetite, alive without being organic. Red Desert (1964) gave him the colour, Di Palma's chemically toned industrial landscapes becoming Kuveiller's drained metals and sickly interior light, a palette that delivers the alienation before a character mentions it. Antonioni empties space until it aches. Petri overfills it until it clangs.
What the film did to the art is easy to state and was not easy to do. It made labour the subject, not a backdrop for melodrama and not poverty observed with sympathy, but the tempo of work as the thing on screen. And it did that without granting the worker the dignity that would have let an audience off the hook. It shared the Palme d'Or with Rosi's The Mattei Affair at the high-water mark of Italian political cinema, and it sits as the middle panel of Petri's trilogy on power and neurosis, between Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion and Property Is No Longer a Theft. The through-line of all three is that power gets metabolized as illness.
Watch it again and, somewhere in the factory, close your eyes for a minute. Find the point where the noise stops being outside him. Then take the question Petri was too honest to answer in 1971: if the shock does not produce the thought, what does?
Concepts in play
- Impulse-image (naturalism) — Volonté plays Lulù's record-setting piece-work as an almost manic productivism, a compulsion with a machine tempo rather than a chosen course of action; the film's arc is a compressed, downward-spiralling drive toward disintegration.
- Symptom — Petri uses Lulù's breakdown as a diagnostic device, dramatizing alienation as a lived bodily condition; his agitation, rage and collapse read as symptoms of the piece-rate drive rather than as decisions.
- Fetish (part-object) — The finger lost in the accident at the lathe — the part-object torn from the body that cracks open Lulù's consciousness and organizes the whole film.
- Derived milieu — Petri stages a series of concrete pressurized environments — the plant, the union hall, the crowded apartment, the psychiatric institution where an old worker has been broken — each a variant of confinement.
- Originary world — The factory is dressed to overwhelm, dense with equipment and human traffic, blocking that keeps bodies in near-constant collision so Lulù is never granted private space; consumer domesticity is staged as the same trap, the promised reward of overtime revealed as hollow.
- Line of slope (entropy / degradation) — Salvo Randone's older worker, consumed and discarded by the system, a spectral figure of what Lulù may become — the end of the slope shown before Lulù reaches it.
- Dialectical (Soviet) montage — Aggressive, percussive cutting built from short hammering shots at the machine, translating repetitive labour into cinematic tachycardia — the direct debt to Strike (1925), which originated the syncing of cutting rhythm to factory machinery and collective labour.
- Spiritual automaton (shock to thought) — The montage does not observe the factory so much as reproduce its assault on the nervous system, with Morricone's harsh machine-like figures blurring into diegetic plant noise; but as the assault continues the editing fragments in step with Lulù's psychological decompensation, so the shock produces breakdown rather than consciousness.
- The gest — Volonté's deliberately unsympathetic, abrasive bodily cadence at the lathe — a posture as loud and driven as the machinery, exposing the wage relation rather than a psychology, and refusing the ennobled-worker cliché.
- Free indirect discourse (political) — Kuveiller's nervy, crowding camera prowls around Lulù at the machine while the staging tips toward the grotesque; the film's didactic polemic is channelled entirely through a single overwhelming subjectivity, fusing Petri's vision with Lulù's.
- Discourse-image — The dramaturgy is frankly didactic and dialectical, staging arguments as much as events — union reformism against student maximalism — and Lulù is fired then reinstated, ending neither redeemed nor victorious.
- The people are missing — Made at the high tide of the Hot Autumn with the shop floors of Turin and Milan in open revolt, the film refuses to flatter any faction — institutional union or ultra-left students — and its reception on the Italian left was correspondingly fractious.
- Expressionism (non-organic life of things) — The debt to Metropolis (1927): the factory rendered as a devouring machine-organism, Petri's pressurized, man-swallowing industrial staging in which the plant behaves like something with an appetite.
- Affective colour — Kuveiller's deliberately drained industrial palette — cold metals, sickly interior light, gray plant monotony extended into the airless domestic spaces — descending from Di Palma's chemically toned landscapes in Red Desert (1964).