cultural criticism

His films systematically critiqued Italian consumer culture, Catholic hypocrisy, and the erosion of traditional values through provocative narrative and visual language.

He deconstructed cinema itself and bourgeois ideology through radical formal experimentation, treating every film as an interrogation of language, politics, and cultural meaning.

His melodramas exposed capitalist exploitation, patriarchal structures, and post-Nazi German society by examining power dynamics within intimate human relationships and social institutions.