A ONE-WAY TICKET. THE FILM OF MARCO BELLOCCHIO
In the shadow of the big voices of Italian cinema (Rossellini, Visconti, Antonioni and Fellini), during the early 1960s, a diverse, heterogeneous group of young successors arose, intent on providing a not-at-all-self-satisfied view of the society that Italy had become after the post-war resurgence. Witnesses of the height of fame and fall to disgrace of neorealism, this group—led by Bernardo Bertolucci, Marco Bellochio, the brothers Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, Marco Ferreri and Liliana Cavani—made a way for itself with a critical point of view. That generation was marked by discontent and anger– if not fury, by sympathy for extreme-left movements and by not hiding their admiration of the styles and themes of the French New Wave (Nouvelle Vague). The Nuovo Cinema Italiano was defined as vaguely (beyond a certain generational component) as the Junger Deutscher Film, the British Free Cinema or the Nuevo Cine Español. That group of youths included the director that ZINEBI is paying tribute to with a well-deserved Mikeldi of Honour for a restless career spanning more than half a century. During a chat with him in Bologna a few months ago, Michel Ciment said that there are “many great first films but not so many twenty-second great films”. The case of Marco Bellocchio (b. Bobbio, 1939) is a rare exception: we would be hard pressed to find more than a handful of directors that started out on their careers at that time and are still releasing such sensational, modern films at the world’s big festivals. The reason he has remained might be found in his capacity to not get comfortable with a certain appearance or narrative and in his furious non-conformity, which has always led him to question the foundations of his society and of himself. As if he knows that life is a one-way ticket, Bellocchio is always looking to the future with the motto of retaining “curiosity about what seems irrational”, as he explained in a letter to Pier Paolo Pasolini shortly after the masterful director had praised his first film, I pugni in tasca (1965), as soon as he saw it.
A poet, artist, theatre and opera director, staunch militant of the Lotta Continua movement since its foundation at the end of the 60s (where he coincided with the writer Erri De Luca, the journalist Adriano Sofri and the politician Marco Boato) until it disappeared in the mid-1970s, a scriptwriter and film director, we could say that Bellocchio has been reinventing himself with the passage of time. It would be fairer, however, to acknowledge his capacity for tackling the staging of all kinds of different projects with rigour and conviction, evolving his own radical, educated and recognisable way of thinking.
It was already apparent in his first feature film. In that violent I pugni in tasca (1965), action breaks out at any time, images are combined during editing when there is movement, the staging is deliberately dirty, and the camera always seems to be too close to characters that do not awaken empathy in the spectator. With no concessions, the cinema of the first Bellocchio is the reflection of extreme commitment to his revolutionary ideas, of the way he thinks (globally) and acts (locally). Bellocchio condemns the moral and political repression that is—from his point of view—suffocating the life of the individual, invoking condemnation if not outright rebellion through documentaries such as Paola / Il popolo calabrese ha rialzato la testa (1969), Matti da slegare (1975) and La religione della storia (1998) and also fictional films such as Nel nome del padre (1971), Sbatti il mostro in prima pagina (1972) and L’ora di religione / Il sorriso di mia madre (2002). He looks critically at the present but also the past of his country through specific 2003events such as in Vincere (2009) or the excellent Buongiorno, notte (2003), a fictional recreation of the kidnapping of the Christian Democrat Aldo Moro. A subject, by the way, that he will return to in a TV series in 2018. More than half a century of non-stop film creation involves ups and downs in a career covering many different thematic areas (from opera to Luigi Pirandello and literary adaptations), but we should underline the one that leads us to his latest work, Per una rosa (2017), part of the personal project that links him to the Fare Cinema laboratory that has taken him back—for many years and with a certain frequency—to his native Bobbio. There, he works alongside a group of youths, creating dramatic works filmed on shoestring budgets.
That was how he directed the six fragments that make up Sorelle Mai (2011), where the director returns to the house where he filmed I pugni in tasca in 1965, with new imagery relating to his own family, slightly fictionalising private events. Here, we can see his aunts Letizia and Maria Luisa, his son – the actor Pier Giorgio, and his little daughter Elena, who he has been filming since 1997 and who now stars in Per una rosa, playing roles that are not very different to their real lives. This short film has not been released in Spain but we can see it at the closing gala of this year’s ZINEBI.
Rubén Corral
Programmer at ZINEBI
