It is a ‘monumental’ document on two generations of 1950s Italy: not because it studies their behaviour, if need be by summarising them through sketches (as they were called at the time), but rather because it captures their salient characteristics for future memory. […] Terza liceo is a carefully constructed film, based on an apparently cast-iron screenplay: each section is a brick that contributes to the overall architecture. The skeleton is that of a high school in Rome, the Mamiani, in viale delle Milizie 30 […] and the central focus is on class 3C, around which revolve professors, students and their parents. Two sides – the youngsters and the adults – articulate a web of sub-plots based around encounters and conflicts. […] This architectural and mathematical construction is enlightened, however, by emotions. It is a musical architecture and mathematics, in which the ‘music’ derives from the rhythm, from the harmony between individual sequences and from the repetition and variation of motifs. Meanwhile, actual music […] is mostly relegated to a diegetic score, and this absence of a non-diegetic score is consistent with the film’s anti-psychological approach. […]

Emmer has made a ‘perfect’ film, classical in form and without a single superfluous shot, in which the camera remains invisible. It is a form that, even if this was not the filmmaker’s explicit intent, is destined to last, beyond the casual parenthesis of modernity. Emmer consistently organizes shots with balanced spacial relationships: full-shots, shot-reverse-shot sequences lacking in modern contrast, two- and three-shots that locate the individual within the group […]. The ‘author’ regulates the (mise-en-)scene like a great, omnipotent puppet-master who refuses to permit himself to become involved. However, with classical precision, he is perfectly aware that such formal economy affords added significance to even the slightest deviation: the intrusion, for example, of simple close-ups into the preponderance of mid-shots.

Adriano Aprà, Emmer classico moderno: “Terza Liceo”, in Mister(o) Emmer, edited by Enrico Ghezzi and Stefano Francia di Celle, Torino Film Festival, Torino 2004