Processo Politico
Arnaldo Pomodoro, Francesco Leonetti
Italy, 1971, 50’
The 1969 Piazza Fontana bombing marked the beginning of a series of attacks, cover-ups, and institutional complicities. It inaugurated a subversive strategy aimed at suppressing workers’ and students’ movements and restoring a conservative political order. The bombing was falsely blamed on anarchists, leading to the death of Giuseppe Pinelli during an interrogation at Milan Police Headquarters, where he had been illegally detained.
Processo Politico (1971) seeks to analyse this complex historical moment. It reconstructs the libel case brought by Commissioner Luigi Calabresi against the weekly newspaper Lotta Continua, which had publicly accused him of being responsible for Pinelli’s death.
The film’s creators were poet Francesco Leonetti and sculptor Arnaldo Pomodoro, who at the time were involved with the journal Che fare, a “bulletin of avant-garde criticism and action” that chronicled social change from a multidisciplinary and internationalist perspective.
Their collaboration gave rise to a “militant film with a fictional subject”—an original fusion of two forms then considered distinct: militant cinema, documentary in nature and opposed to spectacle, and fiction cinema, based on performance and invention. Political Trial brings together both approaches. Alongside semi-clandestine footage of the hearings, photographic archives of the Student Movement, and images of demonstrations, the film follows a fictional strand featuring artists Gianfranco Pardi and Edival Ramosa, as well as young activists.
Stylistically, the film adopts an “anti-naturalistic language”: static, Warhol-inspired shots alternate with rapid accelerations influenced by Glauber Rocha’s cinema. Its editing interweaves footage with repeated still photographs, lending the images a visionary quality far removed from the expository style of investigative cinema of the period. These choices baffled critics when the film premiered at the 1971 Pesaro International Festival of New Cinema, where it met with harsh criticism.
In 2024, marking the centenary of Leonetti’s birth and as part of the “Art & Experimental Film” project, the Home Movies Foundation restored materials held in the Arnaldo Pomodoro Foundation Archive at the initiative of Leonetti’s heirs, producing a new 16mm print. This version premiered at IULM University in Milan in 2025 and was screened this summer at the Pesaro Film Festival, in the same theatre where the film had debuted fifty-five years earlier.
The film’s return to the screen allows us to view it differently from the perspective that struggled to embrace it in 1971. The experimentation once perceived as at odds with political activism can now be fully understood as an attempt to develop a new cinematic language capable of addressing the complex and urgent political discourse the film set out to convey.
In collaboration with the Arnaldo Pomodoro Foundation
