Collaboration and/as Bricolage: Petri, Pirro, Volonté and Morricone between Standard Practice and Authentication in the Aftermath of 1968

The chapter frames the collaboration between the film director Elio Petri, the screenwriter Ugo Pirro, the actor Gian Maria Volonté, and the composer Ennio Morricone in the light of bricolage as interpretive concept. The use of the concept has been triggered by Giorgio Biancorosso’s discussions in preparation of his forthcoming book. In the chapter, bricolage connects aspects of the production and realization of Petri’s film Investigation of a Citizen above Suspicion (1970) discussed by film scholar Claudio Bisoni to Morricone’s musical contribution to this film and to Petri’s subsequent one, Lulu the Tool (1971). The score explains less in terms of an autonomous work of art of the composer-author than of common film music practice plus cultural authentication in retrospect. Not only the unavoidable heteronomy of film music practice can be seen in the light of bricolage, but also the resort to self-borrowing within the domain of Morricone’s film music in a period in which his musical activity in this field reaches the peak of all his career: the purpose is to have the work quick done, with as little effort as possible, and to the director’s full satisfaction. The discourse of the ‘difference’ of Morricone’s practice for auteur cinema with respect to popular film genres, proposed by Sergio Miceli, proves undermined by the observation that Morricone resorts to similar compositional practice in the case of Petri’s political cinema – in terms of choice and use of timbres, creation and elaboration of motifs and themes, construction of musical meaning – and in popular genres as western Italian style and comedy film. His music is authenticated in retrospect by Petri’s films, aiming at intercepting popular culture at large to spread political messages to the widest possible audience. In turn, the success of his films depends less on the individual artistic contribution of Petri as author-director than on his capability of repackaging – again, a form of bricolage – the expectations of cinema audience in the aftermath of 1968. In the end, the films emerge historically from a collective and partly technological performance that is culturally situated in relation to transmedia processes, and the music is part of the play. Its role depends in great part on the role that is allowed and given to it by the circumstances, and on the emergent result, which is beyond the will of the authors and collaborators involved.