Matti da slegare (1975)
Directed by
Silvano Agosti
Marco Bellocchio
Sandro Petraglia
Stefano Rulli
Genre: Documentary
Also Known As:
Fit to Be Untied (USA)
Nessuno o tutti (Italy) (alternative title)
Runtime: 130 min
Country: Italy
Language: Italian
Color: Black and White
imdb: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0073444/
PLOT DESCRIPTION:
This documentary was distilled from a 3 1/2-hour television film Nessuno o Tutti, to make the point that many inmates now in mental hospitals could be released without harm to society, and to their advantage. Both patients -- chosen for their ability to talk before a camera -- and sponsors in the community at large are interviewed to promote the concept of the patients' re-integration into the outside world. Three men (Paolo, Angelo, and Marco -- a mentally handicapped youth) talk to the interviewers about their own perspectives, and while the success of the mentally handicapped working at one plant is illustrated, the implied excesses of hospitals run by the Catholic Church are also discussed. Filming was not allowed inside those institutions. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide
''FIT TO BE UNTIED'' is a messy, shambling Italian documentary about mental patients, intimating (though never successfully demonstrating) that their incarceration is a form of political oppression, and casting little other light on their situation. It was directed by a four-man committee, comprising Silvano Agosti, Marco Bellocchio, Sandro Petraglia and Stefano Rulli, which is to say that it has seams. They show.
As the film meanders from one overlong interview to another, it touches base with a variety of mentally disturbed subjects who have been released from hospitals and placed in more normal settings as part of an experiment. All that these patients have in common is their illness - presumed by the film makers, evidently, to be the fault of their various mamas -and the haphazard way in which their stories are told.
One quick-witted, animated young boy, identified as a discipline problem, is allowed to talk about anything and everything before a medical authority steps in, explaining that one of the boy's favorite insults is ''whore,'' and concluding sagely that this has something to do with his view of his mother. This, and the idea that another, older patient may be fiercely adamant about politics as a way of expressing more personal kinds of hostility, is ''Fit to Be Untied'' at its most insightful. The film will be shown at the New York Film Festival today.
The film makers, who work in a lurching, dizzying style in black and white, fare better when they film some of their subjects in company. A segment about a factory with several retarded workers, where the ordinary employees tell of the satisfactions of being able to help their disadvantaged colleagues, is unusual and rewarding. And the film also includes a conversation between several of the patients and a Roman Catholic clergyman, who defends church-run mental-health facilities and who notes that some people are always bringing up things like the Spanish Inquisition, ''looking at the bad side.'' Elsewhere in the film, a camera crew harasses a couple of nuns, demanding to see the inside of the hospital that they run and forcing the nuns into angry, embarrassed silence. This journalistic tactic turns out to be no easier on nuns than it is on war criminals and embezzlers.
''Fit to Be Untied'' is two hours long. In its last 10 minutes, the film gets around to interviewing women patients, whose problems seem no less interesting than those of the male patients with whom it has been occupied. Some Problems FIT TO BE UNTIED (Matti Da Slegare/Nessuno O Tutti), directed by Silvano Agosti, Marco Bellochio, Sandro Petraglia and Stefano Rulli; in Italian with English sutbitles; photography, Dimitri Nicolau and Ezio Bellani; edited by Mr. Agosti; music by Nicola Piovani; production company, 11 Marzo Cinematografica. Running time: 120 minutes. This film has no rating. At Alice Tully Hall, part of the 19th New York Film Festival.
[XviD-ITA)Matti.da.slegare(S..Agosti,.M..Bellocchio,.S..Rulli.e.S..Petraglia(SATrip.-.fiorfuoco)).avi 
(A very classic and rare italian documentary film...
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